This is my fourth LD, and I think I’m starting to get a hang of figuring out what I can and can’t accomplish in 48 hours. This time around I had a bit of luck on my side. My wife gave me the idea for a similar game a long time ago, but I just never got around to doing anything with it. With a few tweaks, the idea was able to fit the theme. Usually I waste a few hours with a game that doesn’t work out. For this round, I was able to get straight to work.

Snow, squirrels, and pandas!

I got the basic mechanics for “Panda and Squirrel” working by the end of the first evening. This is the whole game, without the “face”:

Saturday, 3 am

What went right:

• I had the rest of the weekend to work on art, music, etc. I usually don’t have that much time after doing the coding.
• The atmosphere came out well. There’s snow and a sunset.

  

• I wrote some code I can re-use on other projects.
• The floor is randomly generated, so no two games play exactly the same.
• I think I have a game I can do some more with later, and some good feedback on what to tackle next (thanks, guys!)

What didn’t go well:

• The focus of the game changed halfway through the project. The original game had more action planned for the ground-level. The change left me with too little time to add more variety to the collectibles and foes
• The code that draws the snow isn’t very optimized. As a consequence, I had to keep the screen size small.
• The two-button control is a bit limiting. A third button to slow the characters down, or even push them backward, would be helpful.
• I would have liked to have given the player more control over the snowball.

Next time around I’d like to experiment with more complex mechanics. One problem I consistently run into is not enough time to test. There are a lot of “why didn’t I think of that yesterday?” moments. This time I didn’t make a total mess of the code, so maybe I can incorporate a few of those ideas into a proper post-compo version

Tags: post-mortem