Woke up last Friday as someone who has never made a game and did not know about Ludum Dare. A crazy 3 days later, I have released my first game.

I wanted to explore the theme restricting the game to a single specific way to interact with the game, which was to click a big button in the center of the screen. I was inspired by the generally horrible Zynga-like games that had little quality interaction with the game, in large part due to the artificial “energy” bars that don’t let you continue until some time had gone by. My thought was to take that mechanic into the most simplest (minimal) form possible:

• Click something
• Some seemingly inconsequential random event happens
• Some annoying time restriction before you could continue
• No completion to the game

So the “game” idea became partial commentary, but I wanted to challenge myself to see if there was anyway possible to make something fun in that framework. So it turned into a game where you click a button and you either gain or lose a random amount of gold or hearts. If you went broke or lost all your hearts, game over. Here are some of the things I tried to add into the mix to attempt something mildly fun:

• It’s essentially a super dumb slot machine, so I wanted to crib from Vegas by making the button pushes big epic noisy visual events. I did manage to fit in a little animation after the button push, but it wasn’t close to the amount I wanted to do. I also ran out of time to implement any sound.
• I added a combo mechanic where clicking the button quickly (under 320 milliseconds) would earn you combos. If you got to 5 combos, you got to see some feedback after your button press about how quick you managed to push the button, as well as your current combo. As you got higher and higher combos, the time between button pushes would decrease and the button shrinks. For example, if you get your combo to 25x, the break between button being active was random between 0.8 and 1.2 seconds, which provides a decent challenge. I wanted to take this further by moving the button around but did not get to it.
• There are 5 trophies you can obtain. The game keeps a running tally of a number of metrics, and trophies can be earned by getting enough deaths, bankruptcies, high combos, overall clicks, and bad clicks. The thresholds to get the base trophy were somewhat small (relatively: you needed over 1000 clicks to get the click one), and they were upgradable all the way up to 1 billion for some of them.
• I cheated a little and added some messages that would be shown after clicking anywhere but the button. There’s about 20 random messages that are shown to the user which are meant to be insults because it’s really hard to miss the huge button in the center. I was hoping that people would stumble onto these and find a little humor in them, and continue to try and trigger all the messages. Examples of these messages include “Juuusssstttt a bit outside….” and “It says Hit Me. I can’t make it any easier.”

Other things I wanted to implement but didn’t:

• Many more different events that happened when you hit the button. I wanted to randomly give (and take away) a bunch of pointless gifts like the ones Zynga has you spam send to your friends. I wrote out a framework of a narrative that would slowly evolve by chaining together combos. The idea was that the button was this miserable character who lived this horrible life of people always beating on him. It would eventually lead you to gain sympathy for him and (somehow) ends in you destroying the button, thus freeing him from his misery. I also like the idea of giving an ending being a screw you to the types of games I discussed above.
• Lots more random visual things that would happen. Moving the button, changing colors, making some background things happen. I also liked the idea of making some “glitches” happen.
• Sound. I even started to conceptualize a song and lyrics that I would record and sing to go along with the story mode

What went right:

• I shipped something.

What went wrong:

• It’s not a fun game: You can chalk this up to poor game design. As I stated above, I wanted to experiment to see if I could create something fun with a very strict rules on interaction. Turns out, I couldn’t. Looking back, I should have known this immediately, because the games I was inspired by bored me to tears. I think I was kind of onto something with the combo system which gave it a little play depth, but even that only holds your attention for 1-2 minutes at most. The extra carrot of the trophies ended up not being worth it because players were super bored well before those were achieved.
• Time: Since this was a last minute decision, I already had a bunch of other commitments. During the 72 hours, I went out for meals 4 times, went golfing, went shopping for a bed (one of the most relaxing and frustrating experience you can enjoy with your wife), watched 2 baseball games, and got distracted by the UFC event. Oh, and I worked a long day Monday so the final 24 hours was shot. Combine this with trying to learn very basic things (did I mention this was my first time already?), l just ran out of time on almost every area, whether it was graphics, features, play tuning, etc.
• Graphics: I am a non-game programmer in real life, and I deal with graphics very little. This was a huge challenge for me, and I was not happy with the visual style. I especially did not like the button graphic. Looking back, I would have made it look exactly like a Facebook game, maybe even with a fake frame that looked like Facebook. Since the game was doomed to not be fun, I could have done more with being explicit with my commentary.
• No web installer: I used monogame, which meant I wasn’t able to ship a web version of the game. Next time, I’m going to switch to Unity so I can ship a web version. I also had issues because monogame has dependencies on .Net 4.0 and OpenAL. I quickly put together a release that included the dependencies (how I did this and the horrible hacks I used could be a separate article) so thankfully most people I talked with were able to get that working.

Conclusion
In all, I’m glad I did it despite the outcome. I learned a TON, and it’s inspired me to continue learning about game development. I am also stunned at how good some of the games I’ve been playing. Can’t wait for #27!

Link to game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22624

Tools Used: Visual Studio 2012, monogame, Photoshop, Illustrator

Sometimes when you haven’t got much time at all, you can do cool things. This is also true of music. Here’s an annotated guide to the general thought process when putting together the music for Invertigo:

Yup.

Here’s a link to the Invertigo soundtrack, for your downloadin’ pleasure! http://soundcloud.com/rotodrone/invertigo

Haven’t played it yet? That number to dial: Invertigo!

Looks like a lot of players have a problem with my game. Right in the ending! So I made this video:

Just a LITTLE bit tricky!

Now Try it Yourself!

When the theme was announced I was actually expecting something like ‘Dreams’ or ‘Ancient Ruins’ to the the winner, but I was susprised by the majority, as usual.. Altrough it took me by surprise (I had Minimalism voted as neutral, havent even considered it), it wasnt a bad theme, unlike past LD’s.. It gave a more broad range of stuff I could do.
Basically, in my head, any game can be minimalistic’d, with the proper approach. Minimalism isnt a restrictive theme at all, au contraire; Its so broad that you can make practically anything, and had it fit the theme somehow.

So, after that my idea was to make an isometric game or a shoot em’ up. I went with the Isometric idea first, and having made only one little isometric game in my whole life, I found it exhausting. Too much little stuff that just dint worked the way I expected, too much code for simple tasks like having to recognize in wich tile im on, etcetera. I ditched iso right away with the promise of coming back to it later on the future, but never again on a LD.

Started with, what I thought it was a shmup, while watching some retro/vintage science fiction posters around the web, and fell in love with some of the styles I found there. I was always a big fan of retro-like stuff, and vintage posters are simply beautiful (when properly done), not to mention most of them are drawn very minimalistically. so the game was started and intended to look like one of those right away. Having the style defined allowed me to start pushing other aspects of the game quickly, like asteroids and props, also creating the gameplay super quickly

While developing the initial aspects of hte game, wich was supossed to be a vertical shmup, I kinda thought of the story behing this little ship I drew.. It looked like a rescue or transport ship more than a fighter/warship.. So maybe we just have to go somewhere or escape from somewhere instead of shooting random hordes of aliens..? And so it happened that I ditched the shmup idea to make a vertical dodge-and-survive kind of game. It lacked most of the elements I would have liked for it to have, but overall, I really liked it, not to mention that the visual outcome was, besides minimalist, very beautiful, even to my likes!

I finished the game within the initial 30 hours of the competition, being the quickest LD for me until now, for wich I am very satisfied, but I lacked the imagination to use the rest of my spare time.. I would have liked to add more stuff to dodge and maybe even stuff like powerups, but I just couldnt think of anything that suits both the theme and the game idea. even until now I found that to be hard work.

Overall, most important things went just fine:

1. I finished the vast majority of the game within 24 hours and all of it within 30hs.
2. I defined a style right into the beggining of the compo, that allowed me to focus on more important things quickly.
3. Having made everything so quickly also left me with plenty of time to develop and poolish different platform ports, especially HTML5 wich is usually a pain to fix, works just as fine as the desktop version with a couple minimal graphical discrepances.
4. Slept more than enough
5. Timelapse didnt failed (phew!)

What went wrong:

1. The game is not as extense as I would like, solely because of my lack of imagination for it, since I had plenty of time to add new stuff.
2. Besides the art style, the game doesnt fit the theme much more.. its a 50/50 thing.
3. No music/sounds.. completely forgot until the last day, and I was like, ‘oh well, who needs that stuff’
4. havent really gone out home in the entire weekend, and I just focused on the game the whole time, in the end I got really stressed. I just wanted to go out and run ~100 miles.
5. havent drew anything on paper before starting, in the end it didnt affected me because I developed the idea right away, but it is the second time in a row I do this, and im scared I wont be so lucky next time.
6. Didnt had a reliable internet connection during the entire compo, that kinda slowed me down a couple times, especially when looking for inspiration or particular images. Not to mention IRC kept on closing unexpectedly and twitter didnt even loaded

Game page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=2290
(the game works on Windows, HTML5 and Android)

Timelapse video:

As usual this was a super-awesome experience, I havent really worked on any game since last month, and the ammount of inspiration this competition pumps on me is priceless, you are all awesome, and I am looking forward to play ALL of your games asap!!

Thanks Ludum Dare people!! =D

Tags: final, post-mortem, thoughts, timelapse, video

So I just pushed a decent post competition build of my entry, Undercolor Agents out, along with a Youtube video here!

I have addressed most of the difficulty and control issues I found post release, and also has a new soundtrack written by Surasshu, to play the latest jump over here. I  Look forward to the feedback on the improvements and the video!

This was, as always, an absolute blast.  I’ve had to miss the last two, due to commitments beyond my control, and last weekend I remembered just how much I’ve missed.

# is a game about shooting squares.  That’s really all there is to it.  Wait… and sometimes the squares grow back. And sometimes they shoot out at you.  Oh… and there’s a piano.

The Theme

We all know the theme.  My take on it was more of an aesthetic than a game play one.  Soft colors, simple objects, piano music playing simple chords.  I think it worked.

The Gameplay

# was a lot of fun to develop.  I had the basic concept in my head prior to the theme being announced, but some of the big mechanics, basically the “layer” shifting and the audio component just sort of happened.

The layer thing was introduced as sort of a player control mechanic.  It is really easy, as was pointed out, to beat the levels by holding the left arrow and space bar.  The layers gave the lower squares a fighting chance to get established, as well as forced the player to do something than just “sit and spin”.

The balance however, was off a bit.  I initially balanced the game, unaware of a bug that could would make the last square invincible to most, but not all bullets.  This made the game considerably harder than it really was.   When the bug was fixed… the game became super stupid easy.

I made corrections, but didn’t get a chance to get back in and really do the balance work the game deserved.   You can eventually get yourself comfortable enough where it’s not frustrating, but probably not in the time the average person plays a LD entry.  I tried to make the early levels as accessible as possible, then ramp up the difficulty rather quickly there toward the end for the more interested.  Not as hard as pre-bug unfortunately… but a decent challenge if the dice don’t roll your way.

The Graphics

Like I mentioned before, I wanted to go clean and simple, and that’s what I did.  Not really a lot to say about it, except I really like the green, and the purple.  Red needs work.

The Audio

I’ve never been an “audio” guy, and this game has a lot of sound happening really fast, bullets flying, blocks breaking…   I knew sounds generated by sfxr would have a high potential for ear bleeding (at least the ones I generate).  As I was shifting through layers, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if the music chords changed when the layer did?

I jumped into the idea with absolutely no idea how I was going to accomplish it.  I almost scrapped the whole thing entirely.  I generated a lot of sound files, and tried to tweak them to work with the rapid pace, with ear splitting results.  I did, somehow, manage found a bright piano sound that would pass, although not perfect.

What went right

• Fun and easy to develop
• I believe there’s a solid concept in there somewhere.
•  Graphics / colors were nice and fitting
•  The audio idea worked.

What went wrong

• That stupid invincible square bug wasted a lot of time.
• Balancing issues, especially consistency.
• The Red Layer

Thank you all for your kind feedback.  I look forward to playing some more games!

Link To The Game

Thanks

Ross (Kitch)

Tags: postmortem, xna

I made a timelapse video of my Ludum Dare entry that I made in 7 hours! Check it out if you feel like it.

PLAY NOW

Wow, Almost forgot to upload my timelapse video.

Only one person has got past level six so far, come on guys…
I didn’t think it was that hard.

My entry.

Tags: timelapse

Finally got the Timelapse for my game up on Youtube, after several long hours of trying to persuade Windows Movie Maker it dislikes crashing on startup. Remind me to get a better program for future LDs…

I also got my soundtrack up on Soundcloud. The soundtrack is available for download, and for those of you who don’t understand what “Royalty free” means, you can use any of it freely in videos, games, whatever you want, without paying anything. All you need to do is give me credit for it.
Although since I haven’t put more than 45 minutes into any of the tracks on this playlist, you could probably find better royalty free stuff.

It’s the though that counts, right?

On the off chance that you do actually ant the Soundtrack, drop me a reply if you want the looping version (doesn’t include the fading out at the end).

Now back to rating!

Dehumanizer is the 16×16 minimalistic ultraviolent game I made for LD26.

It uses an outdated video mode (not Direct3D) to render, so it took a lot of fiddling to get video of it!  (I had to plug my laptop’s headphone jack into its microphone jack using an AUX cable, and record with CamStudio)

Here’s a GIF:

Here’s the full video:

Thanks for playing!!

Well, it took me a whole extra day to make the preloader work right

But now my game actually starts! So you can try it!

It’s still not really tuned for playability, so it’s very challenging.

So far I’ve been able to discover the first 3 elements. Can YOU make BERYLLIUM?

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22869

Hydrogen: Discovered!

Please play this Flash game and leave comments for me, because I intend to continue developing it. I know it’s not tuned up properly — sorry — but I can tell it has fun potential because I personally REALLY want to discover BERYLLIUM before one of you does it!

Please join today on my stream now.

It’s time to play your LD games live or request to play other LD games.

Tags: game, LD#26, live, Ludum Dare, Ludum Dare 26, Relax Stream, stream

Woo, got to 100 games played and rated. It’s a lot of fun, but also a lot tougher than expected since I like giving some useful feedback to each game’s creator(s). Didn’t succeed on all counts, but I think I did a pretty good job.

Anyway, I guess I’m not the first one doing this but I think I’ll celebrate my 100 games mark with a little highlight reel of my favorite games so far!

True Treasure of Kartoffelschloss
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20884

Of the 100 games I played, at least 5 of them had the “you lose an ability/item after each level” mechanic as the core minimalism thread in the game. This game executed it amazingly well. At first it looks like a decent platformer with bad wall jumping, but once you get through a few levels it becomes very deep and one of the funniest and most emotional games I’ve played this LD.

Follow The Line
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=17883

Very simple and polished one-button game. Challenging and frustrating, just like a one-button game should be. It’d probably make a very good mobile game.

Centroid
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12606

Puzzle game where you find the center of mass of a shape. I felt like I’ve seen the idea before but nevertheless it’s still damn original and the execution is great.

Be The Wind
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22673

Not so much a game, more a fun little zen garden. You swoosh around, plant trees, make the procedurally generated trees swoosh around, and smile. Found this one on Reddit, actually.

Gods Will Be Watching
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=11045

The gorgeous LucasArts adventure style graphics is the least impressive thing about this survival adventure. You are stranded on a planet and you have 30 days to get out. In the meantime you have to manage crew morale, food, fix a radio, and generally not get killed by one of the many things that want to kill you. It’s reminiscent of Oregon Trail, if Oregon Trail involved decisions like “should I kill off the mom who is infected with a deadly alien virus so everyone else can eat her rations?”.

Unfortunately, my Unity Player decided to completely crap out on me this last week, so I haven’t played any of the Unity games yet. Hopefully I’ll be able to do that soon because some of these Unity games look damn good!

Oh here have a shameless plug of my own game. My favorite comment so far is that it’s almost as mean as Super Hexagon. =)

i had fun making my first “real” game, called curves.

here are some thoughts.
what went right
i had fun.

i was already familiar with the tools i used.

i didn’t have to draw pictures! trust me, if i make art for anything, it sucks.

my idea popped into my head pretty fast as well, and i finished early.

when i found a game-crashing bug, i slept on it and fixed it the next morning. always the best idea.

speaking of sleeping, i didn’t adjust my sleep cycle too much. this made it very easy on myself, and i never felt tired.
—–
what went wrong
i played it too much. might be a good thing?

my code is an absolute *mess*. especially the variable declarations, they take up a whole page and they’re just a big pile.

i kept worrying about how other people were going to like it.

i underestimated my ability, and took too many breaks. i finished 10h early without trying.

i threw out too much.

i failed to test the old level editor. turns out clicks mapped to every level, not just the selected one. this caused edits to the last level to ruin all the previous levels. luckily they weren’t very good.

i tried to be too minimal. i even thought the friggin particle system was too complex for the theme.
—–
what you and i should do next time

overestimate your skill, and cut things if needed.

remember the rule of 2: when you tweak a variable, multiply or divide by 2. nothing else or you just get all ocd about your number.

remember that 48h is actually a lot of time. and keep the jam in mind: if you can’t get finished, submit to the jam.

help others and ask for help. it’s not like you lose money for losing the dare. be a good loser.

don’t look down on your own game. because it’s great, and nobody gets to see it if you don’t submit it.

thank you.

Naked Shades

a collaboration between Andi McClure and Porpentine

made for the ludum dare 26 jam

the world’s first online multiplayer Twine game, driven by a corpse economy

identity-driven hungry ghost simulator with lamias

the ecosystem is the puzzle

there is a way to escape

#nakedshades on Twitter

I’ve made a few minor improvements to The Vale and will hopefully have custom controls fully implemented come Thursday or Friday. Here’s a list of the updates made:

*added a better in-game explanation of the shield/projectile mechanic
* fixed several tiling errors
* in keeping with the minimalism theme, adding approximately one music track and sound effect
* a few minor level edits to decrease the overall difficulty

After that, I expect to move on with this project. Many thanks to everyone who commented on my entry. The Ludum Dare was a great experience that I hope revisit in the distant future.

How much time does it take to create a Ludum Dare game?

You should play i need to lie down, before reading this post-mortem!

When the theme “minimalism” was announced at 12PM Saturday (Australia) I pretty much knew what I wanted to make. An idea came to mind immediately, and I was able to start work straight away.

I knew that I wanted to build a game based upon a particular set of emotions and feelings, and I wanted to convey these same feelings to the player. Normally I create action games, but I wanted to try something a bit different this time around, something a bit more experimental.

Make a Flash Game?
I started with the intention of making a Flash game so that it would be easily accessible, however after following some tutorials of Box2D integration with Flash-punk, I ultimately gave up, and decided to use Multimedia Fusion 2, the tool I use for most of my projects.

MMF2 has the ability to export to Flash, however I found that the Box2D extension had different behavior to the EXE builds. I decided to cut support for the web and make a Windows-only game. I know that it means less people will play my game overall, but the upside of this was that I could use shaders and full screen to enhance the experience. And this was definitely worth it.

I began the project by getting making the player move with Box2D, and then I had the various black squiggles swarm around. Due to the art style I chose, I was able to rapidly create assets with multiple frames. With each frame only typically taking a few seconds to create.

From here, I continued to play the game over and over again, iterating on designing an experience to evoke a certain emotion in the player.

Time Breakdown
I constantly had RescueTime (referral link) and Procrastitracker running on my computer so I’m able to tell you the exact time it takes to make a game like this and where the time goes. Here are the results:

Social is made up from Twitter, IRC, and Ludum Dare Blog writing. Audio is Audactiy, Labchirp, and FL Studio. Development is Multimedia Fusion 2. Testing is me playing the game.

As I expected, I spent a large amount of time testing and playing my game as well as developing it. It’s interesting to see how much time I spend playing the game, and I’ve noticed a similar pattern in my other game projects. Note that these results don’t take into account the fact that I used MMF2’s built-in image editor to create graphics, and it only captures the active time spent on a window (e.g. I could be reading IRC on my second monitor even though I didn’t have the window open). Overall I spent about 15 hours, 40 minutes, over the course of two days. For a larger set of data, including a breakdown of the times, you can view the Google Doc.

Using a tool like MMF2 was a valuable asset since I was able to continually tweak values, polish, and iterate on my design until I reached a stage where the game finally expressed what I wanted it to.

Interpretations
As for the meaning of the game, I initially wrote some dialogue to be displayed, but apart from being unnecessary, it was also a little too personal. I felt a little strange explaining what the game was based on, and in not explicitly stating it, people are able to apply their own experiences and generate their own interpretations. I was pleasantly surprised by the range of interpretations, and judging by the comments, it definitely impacts people the way I wanted it to.

(This is of course assuming that the player reads into the game a little more than a few black and blue squiggles on a screen!)

Quicker than expected!
At the end of the first day (Saturday evening), I felt the game was close to completion. This is a rare feeling for me in a gamejam. Typically for Ludum Dare I’ll work all of the first day, have a normal amount of sleep on the first night, and then work until 11am on the Monday morning when it’s time to submit (as you can see from my Stray Whisker time lapse). For this LD I was happy that it didn’t take so long. This was primarily due to the theme and the fact that my game didn’t need large amounts of content (such as levels) to be generated. In games like Stray Whisker and Ant Surf Hero, I had to build large levels and test them to make sure they were fun. For this game, it was just about iterating on getting that one mechanic right.

Besides the decision not to include narrative, the only other major decision I made was to change the pink triangles and golden circles in early builds to more meaningful symbolic representations. I think this added a more personal touch andeven if the symbols mean something to me, other players can apply their own interpretations once again.

Most of the graphical elements are synchronized to the breathing which is based on how many black squiggles there are and how close you are to them. The breathing is based on a simple cosine function. I was happy with the sound design, and I think it’s an important aspect of the game. I recorded my own voice for the breathing sounds and I used LabChirp to generate the other sounds. I did further processing and editing with Audacity and FL Studio.

Timelapse
I’ve made a fair few timelapses now, and I think I’ve got some good settings down. I use Chronolapse to capture my primary monitor every 30 seconds as a PNG. Contrary to what you might think, taking screenshots more frequently isn’t of much benefit, as when you make a video, the frames will flick by too fast and they take up much more diskspace (if you’re aiming to make 5 minute 20-30 FPS video, who can be bothered watching something longer than 10 minutes?). So those are the settings I recommend.

(Timelapse of the 48 hours)

It’s always fun to have a token of your work in this way. I like watching the clock tick past minute by minute into the early hours of the morning.

Conclusion
I submitted my game on the Sunday night 12 hours before the deadline, and the following day I simply fixed up the description and links.

Overall I am very happy with how the game turned out. And participating in LD has boosted my creative energy for my other projects.

As a bit of fun, I also bought a domain for the game http://www.ineedtoliedown.com Please check it out and share it with friends!

If you want to find out more about my development and current work, you can Follow me on Twitter @JigxorAndy.

So i made a game called ROCKET RUINS, fancy, huh? WELL maybe, if you have a pc test it out now. Then read my post.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=13757

BACKSTORY:

This was my first game made. Ever. I made a few games on the TI-84+SE, thus the name TIditto, and a few on scratch, actually turned out well on scratch, but this was my first ever “real” game. I usually make the music since that’s what I like, but let’s get into the Goods and Bads.

THE GOODS:

• Successfully made a platformer with spikes walls, flying, endings, potatoes, fake stuff, and text
• Successfully made music and sfx and did it quickly and well
• Had tons of time to make the game
• Learned Game Maker 7 on Friday night and Saturday night

THE BADS:

• Did not spend time well. Spent hours making a mod pack for minecraft, should’ve went to better levels
• Slept really late when I could’ve slept early
• Didn’t know what I was doing and decided to enter a competition without any knowledge
• Bent my neck with improper seating
• Did not incorporate many ideas because i was A: To lazy B: Didn’t know how

Overall I guess this was a success mainly because I actually made a game on time. I scrapped many ideas that I spent hours on trying to make, but all in all I had fun. Thanks for everything LD48, will try again next time after a lot of fun with the 1gameamonth thing! Hope everyone else does well, seeya!

So the code has settled and the sleep has been regained. I’ve thought a lot about how I did this time, especially compared to last time.  I think compared to last time, I wasn’t able to spend as much time on it.  Back in Dec. I was able to get about 20hrs of work in, but this time I only got around 16.  It was also the 48 competition instead of the jam, but both times I was done on Sunday night.

What went well

• The idea went really well with the theme this year.
• I was able to make the game winnable
• I did a good job prioritizing

What didn’t go well

• I didn’t have as much time as I had hoped over the weekend
• I wasn’t able to add mouse input
• There’s no polish to the game
• I could have spent a little less time on the excel look

All in all, however, I’m pleased with the results.  I think the game is fun and will probably take a couple nights and polish it off.  It’s a good time to add mouse support to fission_engine. It’ll be interesting to see it as a complete product.

Tags: postmortem