Just a couple things that I (Thom) wanted to share, now that 34 is behind us, at least from the development side.

This event has become somewhat of a holiday around my house. I pretty much tune everyone else out but the artist/girlfriend(Katie).  My parents and her parents pretty much know they aren’t getting a hold of this weekend, because we’re focusing on this. Welp, this weekend was different.

The first time we participated (LD33), we really didn’t approach it the way we wanted to. We spent so long figuring out how to make the mechanic, it wasn’t really fun in the end.

This time, however, we decided to approach the gameplay differently. She focused on the art before I even touched Game Maker (we knew it was going to be programmer art either way, so why not just get it done). The title screen is garbage (literally just a color fill gradient that is the default for Illustrator, kind of embarrassed about it honestly, cause I know I could’ve done more).  The story screen was built in roughly 2 minutes, and Katie built the “win” screen Friday night when we decided that the goal was a lunchbox.

However, the single level we have, I am very proud of. The level itself was my primary focus from Saturday morning till Sunday night. It only took about an hour to lay it out, but fine tuning the level took much longer. It’s still not perfect (The goal was to create 5 different paths to the top of the area while allowing the player to move freely between the paths at certain points, and I can think of at least one point where that’s not possible). Saturday night, though, I decided to stand back for a minute and do something else.

While our game is hardly perfect, we decided to walk away from it (went shopping and hung out with family, oddly enough), and when we cam back to the game Sunday morning, Katie began play testing and I began polishing the level design. And it helped, tremendously. And I think it’s how we’re going to continue to do it. Friday we worked for about 4 hours, Saturday roughly 7, and sunday was about 3. Had I worked more Sunday, the other screens would be much nicer, or at least cohesive, so there is something to be said about moderation too.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it seems that perhaps getting away from our creations for a minute allowed us to pick them apart better. Sunday we dropped the ball and got too lazy about working on the game, but Saturday was perfect. I honestly couldn’t stand what we had Saturday, and by stepping away from it, I realized I was being too critical. For roughly 14 hours of work, we did pretty good. Just something we noticed, as for LD33, we didn’t do this. I know it’s hard to believe because our LD33 entry (Your Favorite Things) was SOOOOO good (eyes roll HARD), but it seems that a good practice is to stop thinking about it for a minute. Don’t get too lazy and forget to actually work on it (again, sorry for the other screens), but definitely don’t drive yourself insane making it happen.