So, my first ever post mortem and my second Ludum Dare done.

All in all I’m happy with the game, I wish I could have added some more stuff to do (decorate Christmas trees), maybe improve on the Snowman AI so you could sneak and avoid detection.

Please play and rate the game, would especially like some feedback on the difficulty level.

Tools used

• Unity 3d
• Visual Studio (C#)
• Photoshop

What went well

• Used git from the start this time so I didn’t accidentally mess up my project in the middle of the jam.
• Was able to work a lot with renderers, lights and lightmapping, environment maps and other stuff I’ve not done before.
• Learned a lot about improving performance and discovered the Unity Profiler which is awesome!
• Up one dimension from LD33 (2d game), guess next year I’ll have to go for VR.
• I was fully stocked up on energy drinks and food that was quick to make.

What didn’t go well

• Spent about 5 hours trying to figure out what to make Saturday morning.
• Time management is hard! Finished the last bit (spawning monsters, their AI and the win/lose scenes) just before the deadline.
• As a result of the point above, the instructions were not the best, but I have now changed them.
• Personal hygiene might have suffered
• Like last time, there was no time to have anyone else test the game before releasing it.
• Forgot to add a way to track progress (5 seeds need to be planted), I think was just too blinded by already knowing the level and objective so well.

 

People and instructions

Am I the only person who reads the instructions before playing? It certainly seems like that sometimes 😉

I even had instructions in game, but I guess to many people reading a wall of text is not very enticing:

So I replaced this with a slightly prettier version, hopefully that will help somewhat:

Tags: jam, ld34, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, unity3d