It's just couple of days left until end of LD38, so I decided to write up my experience in this short postmortem.

From the first hours of LD we decided to create boardgame-ish tile based city builder (actually, the very first idea was about managing a city under siege, like Stalingrad or something, but war theme was not very admissible). First mockup

Most of sprites was ready after 24 hours so we had a time to play with game mechanics.

Originally we thought about people moving between buildings by themselves, but after some testing we let that idea go. Too much chaos is no good for ‘eurogame’. Chaos

On the second day of LD we was working on the code as hard as possible. But stupid bugs just didn’t wanted to disappear. Fortunately, most of them was eliminated by Artem, but couple are still there, hiding and waiting to crush everything down. Good ol' switch

At the end of the sunday we’ve got the prototype working. And it was very challenging. Like hell, everything burning! We needed to balance everything down. Oh, the last day of LD. That feeling of not making it on time. We still needed title screen, levels and, most important, game balance. At that moment the winning condition was tied with altars, generating victory points, but it was kind of dull and we decided to take a risk and changed everything. From now on the game goal was to occupy every tile. This goal combined with population decreasing mechanics created very challenging, but pleasing feel of struggle. It's like a missing piece of puzzle has appeared. After that change everything started to go by itself. Finally, after dozen of energy drinks (not good for your health, yo!) the game’s finished and I’m kind of proud with the result. (Of course there's a lot of stuff that could be fixed and improved.)