I read midgard‘s post What do you think will happen? and loved the picture. I’ve chuckled at the phrase “Kill me? Huh bro I’m too strong for die.” every day since then, so today I turned it into a desktop.
http://i.imgur.com/LMARX.png

I really enjoyed this competition,it was my first time competing and think I did very well. Next time I will make the controls easier to handle and post the link to the right version(derp).Anyway had a blast and hope to continue the development of this game.

Tags: postmortem

Ludum Dare,sitting there for the first five minutes hitting yourself because you have no idea what to do, and the last five shitting yourself about how slow the game is uploading.

Tags: motivation

Hey guys,

1. I just updated my entry page with a downloadable PC version for those who were having trouble with the web version.  I didn’t make any changes to the game code or anything so both web and PC versions are identical.

2. Thanks for everyone who commented and gave suggestions! I really appreciate it! Hopefully sometime in the near future we’ll have a much more fleshed out version for you guys!

Its some days after the Ludum Dare and I had some time to think about the development. As I wrote in the last post, I am happy that I finished it, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

The GUI design and graphics took me longer than expected, because I had to draw more stuff. This was because otherwise the player would not have sufficient information about the game state. A thing not to underestimate.

The player mechanics were a bit more complicated than expected. This took me also longer to implement. Especially the movement of enemies and the player together (speed, timings) took a bit longer. The tweaking, though still not perfect, took a long amount of time.

I was a bit faster with the map, since the game ended up being a bit shorter than expected.

I also cut away all sound, music and additional effects.

Lessons from this LD:

– Planning and re-planning is a very good way to reach the goal of finishing something

– Graphics can be more simple to save time for graphics

– Some gameplay elements should be optional and only be implemented when there is time

You can watch me programming the game on youtube:

http://youtu.be/MFWtGSbBbYs

Tags: post-mortem

picture of himself from ’87 while at Lincoln Junior High.  He thought you would get a kick out it.  The mustache is amazing (especially for a junior high student).

If you were wondering, Spence was nice enough to star in my most recent LD entry Slime Groove.  I really don’t have much to say about my effort here other than thanks to everyone who left a comment, played my game, and of course participated this round.  I now hand the rest of this post over to Spence.

Spence firing the Slimebuster gun in the game Slime Groove.

“Thanks Chris.  It was a blessing to work with you.  Your professionalism, your insight, your trust in me to execute a scene and experiment; all of this really helped me tap into my character and make Slime Groove I truly think a great game.  I also want to thank my co-star Sandy.  She is a master of the acting craft.”

The beautiful Sandy in the game Slime Groove.

To tell you the truth acting is easy in a game like Slime Groove.  The set, the props, our costumes–all of it really makes it easy to immerse yourself into the story.  It really is amazing the effort that went in to all that.  Some of the props and sets took hours to make, I mean the whole game took 48 hours to make!  That is a long time, but well worth the wait.

Chris told me something very interesting once while on the set.  He said that unlike his previous Ludum Dare entry he was going to build this game from the outside in.  Meaning I think he started with the art and animation and put a lot of time there.  Once he had the art down only then did he move to the gameplay and other items.  I don’t know if this works for other game makers, but Chris seemed happy with the results, even though he wanted to do so much more if the time allowed.

I look forward to the next Ludum Dare and I hope to once again work with Chris.  Until then you can follow his work on twitter @cacciatc and www.dullahansoft.com”

Thank you all so much for all the feedback you’ve given me on Ninjural Selection!

By far the most common complaint has been the lack of a goal. So that’s what I’m giving you now!

Play the updated version of Ninjural Selection!

Now there is a randomly generated “goal” invader, which you must try to get the actual invaders to look like. The game keeps track of the current “best” invader, the one that most closely matches the goal, and shows you how close it matches (for example, 75%) and highlights it with a spotlight.

There’s not much strategy – just find the best invader, pound eggs out of it in the hopes of mutating something even better, and kill the others to make room for them.

With the current invader size (8×8) it takes a long time to actually reach 100% of the goal. And right now, nothing happens when you reach it, other than a congratulatory message. But my plan is to have multiple randomly generated levels, where the invaders start small and get bigger with each level you complete.

The game is still far from done! We’ll see if this goal can be made fun. It would certainly help if the environment was laid out better, and if it were easier to kill invaders that you choose and make eggs for the invaders you choose. I’ll probably have to adjust the way shooting works and how the invaders separate from each other, among other things…

Let me know if you have any ideas. Suggestions are welcome! 😀

Aha! I’ve now reverse psychologically tricked you into reading this. You shall all now do my bidding. Mwahahaha. I mean… You won’t do my bidding. Yeah. That’s bett- …worse.

Continuing on with my established style for postmortems, I’m going to go through this thing first with a development summary, things I succeeded in, and lessons I learned to end it. So, let’s begin.

Summary- Just before going into this one, I felt pretty good. I’d just finished my second game ever, Placeholder, for the warmup, and that was a pretty good boost of confidence. During the time the competition began, I was at a car dealership with the family, which was fine, because I was just going to brainstorm anyway for an hour. I was trying desperately to get a signal so I could read the theme on reddit, and when I got it, I was hit with a bombshell. EVOLUTION. WHAT?! THAT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO WIN! I had mentally prepared for all the themes, quite literally, except for evolution. In the end, I think it was McFunkyPants’s book that pushed Evolution over. He mentioned it, saying “maybe it’ll win” with a wink, and, albeit unintentionally, rocked the vote a bit. Well, it was gonna win sooner or later, I suppose.

So, my first idea was beating up Charles Darwin.

Yeah, no.

My REAL first idea was a game that evolved depending on how you control it. The game would start off with a rectangle that would become your character or something else entirely… It would be vague to allow transition to other genres. Epic, but was it something I could make? I immediately told my brother and mom the idea anyway, though. My mom’s reaction was, “That’s impossible.” It was, wasn’t it?

So, I went with a choose your own adventure platformer. Fun, right, and sort of evolving as in evolving thought. Here’s that mind map:

After a while, I realized this was boring me to death.

So, I decided to go back and think through using the other idea. Risky. But, as I said in another post, I realized throwing away that first idea was a tip for people who wanted to be winners. And I knew I should do what felt right, regardless of whether something would come out of it.

So, I mind mapped that. I no longer have the same map from those early stages, but it involved several games the final version did not include, such as an asteroids clone branching off the shmup if you kept up held down (you have to in asteroids), a more open metroidvania coming from going right instead of left (get it?), a short grue-related text adventure, a game where you threw the block against the walls to try and cause a certain amount of damage within a shot-clocked period of time, a point-and-click adventure where the rectangle is a keycard, and a few others I’m likely forgetting. I was in love with the project’s concept.

On the first day, I began by making all the arrow-based gamestates work in their basic forms, without level design. I did this to an extent. The first day was wrapped up with the platformer working, the rpg character moving, and the ship moving around the screen with its rocket. The bullets were still buggy when I went to sleep.

Day two, I got the ship mode working first and foremost, fixing the shots (I’d like to thank Michael James Williams’ tutorials for teaching me how to make bullets work right in the first place) and making the ships spawn from the ceiling. I also designed a few platformer levels and called that part done. But the turn-based rpg was the killer. It needed a lot of work. I wanted it to be like the one in the LD23 keynote, where you avoid the enemies, then get a sword to kill ’em with. At the time, I envisioned rooms connecting all of the different parts of the map. But I didn’t know how to leave the enemies in memory, so they’d still be there when you returned to the room. Bugs galore were getting in the way of things, and by the end of the day, I realized I had an incomplete game to submit.

With only a flicker of sadness and that feeling of failure, I went for the Jam with a happy, relaxed attitude. When I went to bed, I thought of just using a camera and one big room for the rpg. It worked marvelously, although it was a bit of a trouble to traverse it quickly, I realized. But I couldn’t fix it, speeds were hardcoded. More on this later.

I spent the last few hours working on the topdown shooter and recording some extra sound effects. (BEEEEwoooaw “FAILURE.”) In the end, I had about two and a half hours left for one more mode. After almost starting on it, I decided to submit. I’d rather not break something last minute.

Comments immediately showed that the game is way too slow. Indeed, this is true. You see, in the beginning, everything moves a set speed. This speed was designed to create a realistic jump, blast off, and rpg move all in the same key presses. I decided this speed so early on that it was going to be impossible to change without editing the values of all these other gamestates. My numbers were hardcoded, and it was not a smart move. I had no room for tweaking.

Other than that, comments have been positive on the overall concept. (Not counting RawBits, who apparently sees no connection with evolution here.) There is a glitch on certain systems with entities not updating at the same speeds (thus causing bullets to lag behind ships), which I apologize for, these bugs are not present on my computer.

All in all, I’d call this one a grand success.

I said it was a success! *sigh*

Successes-

• I made a game I thought I could never finish. Sure, it took extra time, but who cares?
• My first experimental title. I call it this because… Well, it has that feel, man.
• I got that old entities system to do something it’s worth using for. (Previously, I’d been using it in ridiculous ways, like in Empty, for example, make the player move. That’s what main.lua is for! Kinda.)
• In fact, I used a lot of libraries in ways they’re supposed to be used for the first time.
• This isn’t directly related to the game, but I feel like a lot more people know my name by now. Like I’m starting to become a recognizable person instead of another newbie to ignore, you know?

Lessons Learned-

• It’s okay to pull back to the Jam. I don’t know how many people I’ve seen who say “I ran out of time” in their compo entries. The Jam’s there for a reason, people!
• Tips and guidelines are for people who don’t like having fun.
• Make sure things are tweakable. You don’t want to get trapped into a game where the variables just don’t work in your favor and you can’t fix it.
• Mind mapping does rock after all.

Some Inconspicuous Notes

Alright, I don’t want a firestorm to start in the comments over this, whether it be good or bad, but something should be written. A while ago, I made that post about Mohammad. I asked people to help him out with his dad, but he ended up getting help on a lot of other things, too. He got pretty mad at some people, and returned some pretty enraged comments. PoV then threatened to have him banned for this, and causing all the commotion in the community. So, PoV called for everyone to calm down and reset. The next day, Mohammad posted something else off topic, people still got mad at him, he got mad back, and some people said he ought to be banned. I got mad at him over this really bad move, and he then asked if it would be better if he left. I said yes. I figured, at the rate this was panning out, he would be banned anyway. And so, Mohammad said his goodbyes, and that he would keep communication to a minimum until the ratings were over and then just disappear. I was prepared to write a whole post on this decision to tell him to leave, until I realized I was really just frustrated. I took it back today, and now Mohammad’s here to stay with a better attitude. And I even got him to write with capital letters. In summary: PoV, situation neutralized, reset complete.

The Future

So, I have a lot of plans for the future of Puzzlem00n Development. I’m going to focus on branding myself and the site, but details will be withheld until I have time to make a post on the subject. Until next time,

-Puzzlem00n

Robo[R]Evolution was a very exciting game to make, despite things getting very stressful before the end of the 72 hours. Overall however I had a ton of fun working on my first Jam game. If you haven’t played it yet, give it a try! People really seem to like what we’ve made.

 WHAT WENT RIGHT

• Pretty graphics- Skyler spent a lot of time making TELEBOT look cool and spiced things up with a lot of vibrant color and animation.
• Music- Besides working on art, Skyler also put a decent amount of time into making the game’s 10+ minutes of music really add life to the game.
• Theme interpretation- A lot of people chose to make robot-themed games based on the Evolution concept but we got our earliest ideas nearly 15 minutes into the competition, so there wasn’t much time wasted on coming up with stuff to do.
• Story- Joe’s writing was fantastic and definitely added to the general feel/mood of things each time TELEBOT evolved.

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Time Management- It was hard to get things done in a timely fashion. Nate got sick on the 2nd day and needed extra rest, and without any direction Skyler got a bit distracted for a few hours.
• Bugs- Despite the extra 24 hours, Nate had some serious issues programming some key features before time ran out, leading to corner cutting. Luckily he had just enough time to throw a hotfix out before the submission hour ended!
• Balance- First the game was WAY too easy- then the hotfix made it WAY too hard. The post-jam version fixed some things but there is still work to be done.
• Pacing- At first, the game was going to be 100 waves long, but it ended up taking almost an hour just to get to the first story advancing sequence at wave 20! So that was quickly fixed before the first release.

Tags: Ludum Dare, Ludum Dare 24, post-mortem

The game’s Ludum page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=rate&uid=11391

I’ve made some adjustments for my Ludum Dare entry Tiny Evolution Adventure, the original game is a bit unpolished because I was running out of time, but the post-compo versions have many small fixes:

-Fixed bug that prevents level 2 exit from working sometimes.
-Adjusted controls and difficulty.
-Edited intro text.
-Bigger bite detection area.
-fixed level 3 parallax background

Post-Compo version is playable at Kongregate and Newgrounds. The original unedited entry is playable at Stencyl.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2012 at 1:55 am and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Ok, Maybe you’ve seen me do stupid posts about my game and Bells©, where alot of you either nicely, Or like a very angry man, told me to f*** it off with these posts. Well, ill get into that later. For now it’s onto my game! *NOTE: Please, Before you make a comment about recent arguments, Let me just say i’m sorry for any recent action taken onto you. But if you don’t like my posts all together, And want me to leave, Then please, Nor I or anyone else likes this kind of feedback.* Anyway, With that out of the way, Lets get started! My game, Known as Evolution of Monsters…Surprisingly was made after my ranting was taken out on a sound editing program. Let me get down to how it started, My father, As you know, Wanted to go out…And the theme was 6 minutes away from being announced, So we got into a HUGE argument, Where I kept on begging him not to take me out. In the end, My oldest sister decided to stay, And that got my face stuck to the screen. When the theme was finally announced, My heart freaking SANK DOWN TO MY TOES. I had worked on my piano for a HOUR before it started, because I would need it later on. I expected Abandoned, But sadly…THAT MADE IT SECOND IT LAST! Then for the next 3 hours I kept making posts and ranting about the worst idea ever thought by the Community, EVOLUTION!!!

Then I loaded my music editor and screwed with it. I made a cool sound with it and immediately got my idea: A Horror! Then I loaded blender and got to work! (After a few basic tutorials…) and I successfully made my first model. Then my Second (Much more scarier!)

and then my Third. (The one in the game.) But as time passed, I quickly realized that the compo was too far for me. My chest heaved.

I was going to do more ranting, then I realized I had the Jam. I really want to do the compo and show I wasn’t a wimp…But time went out to Lunch! So I had no choice, The Jam it was. But I had already made models and sound, and I didn’t want to scrap the idea to a 2-D game, So I downloaded an engine on the GameMaker website. I knew how desperate I was, So I went with it. Edited it, Made a couple sprites, And loaded it. All that was left was levels… But I only had 2 Hours left…So…I…Published it how it was. 3 Levels, A bunch of glitches, (And Puzzlem00n put a link to the outdated version). So I fixed it up, And put it up for those who care. My dad, however,Was not a big fan of my work, And we got into a “Deep” conversation, In which he asked the fellow Ludum Community to deal with this problem. And…It got out of hand…With poV making a “Unexpected” appearance…And…I’m gonna let the story talk for itself. BUT I DONT WANT COMMENTS ABOUT THIS CHAT. ITS OVER WITH AND ALL COMMENTS ON IT WILL BE REMOVED. I DO NOT want to get into another argument. Anyway most of the comments said my game was “Hard” but fun! If you ask me, This was my first ludum, And thats what I want to hear  .

“game over?”

BARRELS! ~pewdiepie!

Watch where you step!

-The positive

-Besides positive comments, I felt alot more…Enlightened…By this post!

-I now know how to model with Blender and will be looking into more tutorials!

-Now know more about 3D with GameMaker!

-The negative 

-Nearly got banned

-Lost alot of good reputation (If I had any!)

-Became an enemy with ALOT of other programmers.

?Missalinous?

-Got a walkthough!

-Got a Channel!

-Learned how to use Caps!

play it here! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14064

Finally got round to uploading the development timelapse for my game R/evolution.

I thought this game was actually pretty cool, so I have continued working on it in bits and pieces

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=5405

I’m not sure what on earth made me think I could get all of this done in 48hrs

I did however come up with an ‘engine’ that will help me revitalize all the previous LD entries. So in effect I will eventually get 3 games for the code of 1 !!

I made a gameplay video (this is the post-mortem version, but the only difference from post-mortem is music and menu icons in top right corner, and a few small fixes. Gameplay is the same.) of my game Space Ham, which you can play and rate here. It takes a while for the action to pick up, as you can see in the video, but once it does, it’s a game about surviving from being eaten by your own clones. The more ham you eat, the more clones you spawn, and eating ham is essential to get a good score, so the game has a nice feedback loop where you’re in control of how fast the game will evolve, and how hard it will get. Enjoy.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14271

Looks like some people have problem to finish my Ludum Dare’s game, even if puzzles and minigame are quite easy. So i made a video to show you how to beat the game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-201iKnE2dY&feature=youtu.be

I hope this will be useless, and everyone can finish the game by themselves, but you can’t say.

I’ve been thinking that there was something missing from the Ludum Dare voting categories (and apparently I’m not the only one). Mr. Zarzecki gave me an idea as to what that was, but I think I’ve found an answer that’s a little less specific and a little more versatile (imho): “Usability“.

You know that game that has the great graphics, catchy chiptune soundtrack, and unique ideas, but is let down by its controls? Have you come across a game that is great once you get it going, but is a pain to get running? Or perhaps you’ve just played a game that looked fine, but ran at 4 frames per second?

Usability is a category that defines the user’s technical experience of the game, or how easy it is to actually use, never mind play. It includes everything from the player’s experience in unzipping, installing, or loading the game (EDIT: read my EDIT!), to the UI, controls, and framerate. It incorporates the user’s interactions with the program, outside of the game itself. It could even include how easy the menu is to navigate, or how awkward it is to get the game running on your calculator.

I realise that I’m new here, and that it is totally not my place to make suggestions like this. However, I think that Ludum Dare could really benefit from an addition like this. Perhaps my fresh new perspective is an advantage?

If you like the idea of Usability, or have a suggestion for an alteration (or a completely new category, whatever) feel free to shout about it in the comments. Zed (of Flibble fame) also has a suggestion for a new “Narrative” category, if you want to discuss that too. Or, if you have the power to actually make this happen, I beg you to at least consider it.

So. Usability. That’s my jam.

-iandioch

EDIT: Okay, a problem in my original idea has appeared, and that is in my mentioning of the installing/unzipping experience being included into the Usability score. This of course would be completely biased to web games, which would limit people to Flash, Java, etc. I’m sorry guys! That didn’t occur to me at all when this idea first popped into my head. So that element obviously cannot be included into it. But I still think we need this category, or something similar (“Polish” as one person suggested? But it doesn’t include controls).

Hello Guys, Mohammad here with one small request from the community. I’m making a  Fighting Game based on the Ludum Dare Community…And I was wondering if you guys could send me a full picture of your icon or you in a few fighting stances so i can implement them into my game. My E-Mail is here: [email protected] /* */ (I Check My Spam Too!) As I will be picking the best pics or the most recognizable.

And if your wondering about the game, Its totally free and will be used for no commercial purpose other than your entertainment.

I’m just asking for a icon that the Ludum should need to be remembered by.

Try out and rate the original game here.
Try the post-compo version here.

Ever since I have determined that my game lacked “lasting appeal”, I spent the last few days experimenting with a number of gameplay mechanics to add to the existing one. There were some that were interesting (like one idea where you can fight the virus directly by shooting its core) but most of them detract from the basic player experience that I want to retain. And that is the tension of dynamic platforming.

Most of my decisions so far was dictated by my desire to retain the core mechanic. My rule of thumb right now is if the player is not jumping around all over the arena, then there’s something wrong with the design.

New additions:

With update 1.1, I’ve introduced a new pickup-item: The recovery node. This replaces the repair node in terms of functionality. Picking this up will recover nearby tiles and increases the points to reach the next level. On the other hand, picking up the repair node will add one “repair bullet” which you can use to repair tiles at will. By having two separate pickups, each with their own risk-and-rewards, I am forcing the player to choose under pressure which can add more to the tension.

I have also changed the way on how a repair bullet works. Before, tiles are restored at random which made the resulting platforms very unexpected and risky. With this new change, the immediate surrounding neighbors are the ones that are restored forming a nice big platform which is very helpful to save you in tight situations.

Update 1.1 summary

• Picking up repair node (wrench and screwdriver icon)  gives you one “repair bullet”
• Picking up a recovery node  (the bandage icon) increases your points to get to the next level
• Repair bullet now restores tiles with a definite shape
• Placed a “bullet” counter at the top of the crosshairs
• Some performance and code improvements

Try out the post-compo version here. If you still haven’t, please rate the original entry here.

This time around I saw a lot of good games with a lot of great art styles! Unfortunately I didn’t see much use of distinct music in a lot of games, but they were still nice.

Some things I noticed were:

ABSOLUTELY NO FIRST PERSON UNITY GAMES HAD A PAUSE SCREEN EXCEPT FOR MINE!!!

(with the exception of Accidental Rebel’s Complexivity )

I ALWAYS have a pause screen in my games and for some that I played, it wasn’t even possible to quit without Force Quiting the App.

Please people think about BASICS in a first person game.

However most people nailed the graphics style, and that was nice.

Anyways thats me rambling, play my game HERE and happy gaming! <3

Tags: judging, rambling, review, unity, unity3d

Introduction and special thanks

This was my first LD, and I came here fully expecting to faceplant from over-ambition or poor time management. But I submitted my puzzle game, ‘Additive’, polished and complete with hours to spare. It’s the first complete game I’ve ever done, and it’s gotten more positive feedback than I had dared to dream, and the process of making it shoulder-to-shoulder with all you other fine people (especially on IRC) was awesome.

Before I start the post-mortem, I want to thank ‘Cake’ from IRC for giving me a quick pep talk around six hours into the compo, when I was feeling particularly unprepared. I also want to thank all of the IRCers who complained that my first release candidate was too cryptic, and especially ‘Tau’, who played through the entire thing and deliberately found ways to break it. My game would be half of what it is without such playtesting. On with the post-mortem!

Part 1: The pre-feedback post-mortem

This is actually the second post-mortem I’ve written for Additive. The first one, written immediately after submission and before voting opened, can be found here. Its salient points are:

What went great

• I knew my strengths and weaknesses at the start of the competition, and this guided me towards reasonable ideas and goals.
• Making a puzzle game was a great decision because the very nature of a puzzle game works against feature creep.
• I used a notebook to organise myself and work through problems.
• I set some time aside to brainstorm ideas.
• I developed a quick way to make levels, which was more efficient and accessible than building the game board in Unity’s editor.
• I avoided crashes by limiting sugar and caffeine intake.

What went poorly

• It was very difficult to design puzzles.
• The game is not colorblind-friendly because I had a hard time letting go of the aesthetic I had developed. This is not the kind of developer I want to be!
• I didn’t have enough time to deepen the game’s mechanics.

Part 2: The post-feedback post-mortem

 More things that went great

• I decided on a feature lock after the first day. By the end of the first day I had a working game. The second day was dedicated solely to polish and level creation: no gameplay changes allowed.
• I did early testing. Sticking the game up on my Facebook delivered exactly zero constructive criticism. Posting the game on IRC for fellow devs to play got me immediate blow-by-blow feedback, and my time budgeting on Day 2 allowed me to work on every single one of the issues that were raised.
• I put a lot of effort into visual player feedback. I changed the buttons on the main menu at the last minute to make them look more buttony and clickable. There’s a nice marker to indicate the selected block. The marker and the selected block pulse with color. Blocks animate towards their new positions instead of just teleporting over.
• I spent even more time on aural feedback. When you click on a block, it makes a sound. Deselecting a block makes a different sound. You get a different sound again when you try to make an invalid move. When blocks combine, the sound they make depends on the outcome. Sound makes a game feel alive and reactive. Skimp on graphics before you skimp on sound.
• I think I picked a fairly cohesive style. The game is an exercise in minimalism (like I said in Part 1, I knew I was bad at art). Its presentation was informed by the effect of parenting a spotlight to the camera and tilting the camera 45° towards a plane. I felt that an understated look deserved an understated and elegant sound, so I used single piano notes in GarageBand iOS for sound effects. The game would have been a dissonant mess if I had used SFXr.
• Having the tutorial levels was a good idea. It gave me the opportunity to dress the game up with prose, and it also communicated the essence of the game efficiently and enjoyably. It became even better when I added explicit instructions on suggestion from the IRC testers.

The only other thing I can think of that went poorly

• The black squares imbalanced the game. It was intentional that you’d be able to walk the black squares around in the last level, gobbling everything up with wild abandon. I didn’t know that this was possible in the other levels, and the game’s difficulty suffered as a result. Some of the levels have black squares adjacent to each other because I was actively trying to avoid this exploit. If you poke through my timelapse and my source code, you’ll see that I actually did have other ideas for color combinations and win conditions (some of them were actually suggested by players in the game’s comments), but I knew that the game was already pretty good with black squares as they are, and I had no time to change the mechanic and playtest it to my satisfaction.

In all, I’m incredibly proud of what I made. It turned out far better than I expected, and the experience is invaluable. I am already feeling the itch for some rapid prototyping, so you know I’m going to be back in December. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to play Additive if you haven’t already!

A surprise for you, dearest reader!

I’ve uploaded pictures of the dev notebook entries I made during LD24 to Additive‘s page on my website. It starts the day before LD, and ends with the list of things I wanted to address in this post-mortem.

Tags: journal, notebook, post-mortem, postmortem, SuccessStory