- \n
- First time finishing a compo entry. So, so, so much harder than a jam (for me), but oh my so much more rewarding.<\/li>\n
- Being a solo dev who can touch on art, music, sound, level design, and game mechanics while tying it all together with a cohesive theme in 48 hours makes you a god in my eyes. You’re amazing.<\/li>\n
- Music is really, really hard. I thought I could ‘wing’ it, and I really could not. BeepBox<\/a> helped, but I have neither the talent nor the training to do anything useful in that arena.<\/li>\n
- Practice a little bit of everything if you want to solo these.<\/li>\n
- Scope remains one of the most important things.\u00a0I found what helped me was to set in stone two separate lists: must-haves and nice-to-haves. If you don’t finish must-haves you don’t have a game to submit. Once that list is done then start pulling out your favorites from the nice-to-haves.<\/li>\n
- Polish belongs on the must-haves list.<\/li>\n
- You don’t have to be an amazing visual artist to make your game have some visual appeal. Simple tricks like drop shadows and squash and stretch animation do wonders. I like how\u00a0the aesthetic of my game turned out, and I load zero external graphical\u00a0assets (other than a font file. So I guess that’s actually 1).<\/li>\n
- Progression in your level design is important. Ramp the player up, introduce new concepts in an appetizing way and THEN hit them over the head with it.<\/li>\n
- It helps immensely to watch someone play who\u00a0hasn’t spent the past two days playing\u00a0the same levels over and over.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n
A huge congrats to everyone that finished, and a hearty round of applause for everyone who even tried. This is hard, but so worth it! See you again in April.<\/p>\n
![\"Roto\"](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/ld12.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>","time":"December 16th, 2015 1:07 am","title":"Mini-Postmortem"}