Hello everyone,

I hope you are all satisfied about your Ludum Dare game and working hard on playing an rating other people's games :)

I wanted to just give a short Postmortem about @ohanhan and mine game called "Clash of the Fungus".

General

This is my second real Ludum Dare (the first being LD 36) with several Mini LD participations before and in between and my first Ludum Dare with ratings and a team. We were a team of two: me, the programmer working with Unity 5.5 and a small ever-growing set of general Utility classes, and @ohahan being mainly responsible for the graphics using Photoshop. Also one of my brothers in Germany composed the two music tracks for the game.

Finding the idea

This stage took quite a bit longer than we expected (a total of 4 hours including lunch break).

First problem was properly translating the theme into Japanese since "A small world" had in my opinion (but I'm not English speaker either, so that might be wrong) both the nuance of small (小さい chiisai) as in ants and bacteria but also confined (狭い semai) as in not wide, not spacious.

We had several ideas ranging from a fish trapped in an aquarium and finding out there is more to the world than his small confined living space, to a Mario-esque Jump & Run where the main character was just 1 pixel big and you could see the whole stage at once...

But in the end we went with the very first, silly idea we had... A Fighting Game starring stationary mushrooms. (Thus using small world in the sense of "not big")

I once listened an inspiring 5 minute talk at the local Indie Developer meetup here in Osaka where the main message was - try to remove something essential instead of adding something to see what kind of interesting idea you might get. The example in question had been: How would Tetris be like if you played it with the mouse instead of the arrow keys ;)...<

So we tried the challenge to create a fighting game where the characters cannot move.

One thing we definitely DID NOT want to do was anything related to small planets with Mario Galaxy-like gravitation, since a first quick survey of Twitter and the LD Blog posts revealed that many ideas were going into that direction.

Development

From my experience with the last Ludum Dares I knew that I could easily get lost in non-essential small details and not have something playable until the very end. Therefore our rough plan was:

Day 1 - Playable Prototype Day 2 - Feature Freeze Day 3 - Balancing

Unfortunately it did not go as fast as we expected and I guess that's mainly because I'm just not very fast and coding and have a big preference for doing things properly rather than quick.... So everything we had after our first day was about this:

Since we both had to work on Monday (LD starting in Japan on Saturday at 10 am) we would only have very limited time on the final day - and we still tried to keep the balancing on our Agenda since quite a lot of the fun would depend on how hard or easy the game was.

But from Sunday eventually we just went into crazy full development mode. And at the end of Day 2 the game in its current form was mostly finished.

Then I made a decision about which I'm not sure if it was a good one in hindsight.... I definitely wanted to have a character select screen to capture the feeling of the old arcade fighting games and this screen eventually took away most of the time that could have been used for balancing. I'm still quite satisfied with the end result ;) But maybe other things should have had higher priority than a screen that will only be shown a few seconds before the game. The spent time vs. gained value ratio of this feature was definitely not good...

The final feature I implemented on Monday night (Remember? Feature Freeze on Sunday? :sweat_smile: ) was the simple AI (until then it was 2 players-only - which would have been extraordinarily bad for a game jam submission)... But that one time my proper well done coding approach actually helped me out since with the abstract Input Manager that I had written it was easy to replace one of the player's inputs just with AI button presses. So after about 2-3 hours I had a somewhat decent AI and went one to final parameter tweaks (damage, mushrom decay etc.)

What went well

• Working in an actual team at the same physical place helps a lot with boosting creativity and motivation and getting immediate feedback about your creation :) We will participate again in August
• Actually making a rough plan and keeping it maybe 50% - Going from no plan to a plan is a big step for a chaotic mind like me
• Though we struggled with the idea in the beginning, I like the peculiarity and uniqueness of what we came up with

What could be done better

• Keeping more than just 50% of the plan. Next time I want to properly write down a list of prioritized (and maybe even time-estimated) tasks than can be cut off at any moment if the time of the current phase should run out
• Not sure what I should to about my slow coding... I can only hope that with more and more game jams my private library of support classes that makes everything faster and easier (so to speak my own Game Engine on top of Unity)

Thank you for reading. I would be glad if you could play and rate our game :video_game: and let me know your opinion in the comments... I will try to also play and rate your games in the remaining time