I’m not sure what it is about LD, but after the event and doing a bunch of game ratings I always seem to forget about doing an actual postmortem. As such, this is our little team’s fourth LD and our first postmortem (although we do have four timelapses)! Hopefully this is the start of a good trend.
So the theme was minimalism. Unlike past LD’s, we didn’t brainstorm too long. All I really knew was that I didn’t want to do a game with colors and squares and things of that nature. Eventually one of our dev’s said “What if you were a toaster?” Our new artist chimed in and said she liked the idea of animating a toaster, and thus our game was born. We were making a game about launching toast. Toasters are pretty minimalist machines, right?
The Good
This was probably our easiest LD yet. For LD25 we used Tiled and had to write a level loader, had fire mechanics, and all manner of crazy things we had never done before. In this game we just, well, launched toast. With such a basic concept we were able to make progress very quickly. We tasked the artist with making some toast and toasters, and we wrote some code for menus, throwing condiments, launching toast, and things like that. Soon enough we had a toast launching program that we called the ‘toast fountain’ which we were all fairly amused by.
Another of our artist friends came in on Sunday and a bit on Monday to help throw together some menu graphics and make some additional toasty products, so that added some additional polish to the game.
The Bad
Our main artist had never done anything with games before, and at times it was clear we didn’t communicate what exactly we needed. We ended up spending some time retroactively fixing some of the images.
Our sound person showed interested but was ultimately unavailable. This left us without the great music we had last time. I wasted a lot of time looking for a free song that I thought went with the game, but I didn’t find anything. Eventually one of the other dev’s grabbed Autotracker-C and tweaked the output until we had something we considered decent.
On the programming side, we had some growing pains. I made a small engine on top of Pygame to avoid the hassle of rewriting the same code again and again as we had been doing for the other LDs. This used bits of previous LD code and some other abstractions. It was incredibly untested, so we’d sometimes hit errors (mainly with drawing). However, once we got things ironed out we finally entered the modern era where we had dirty sprites that didn’t require us to redraw the entire screen.
Something else I’ll be fairly critical of was the lack of an actual goal in the game. None of us really like high score games, but despite having several ideas on how the game could operate we never bothered implementing anything better. In fact, until the minutes before release, it didn’t even have a time constraint! It was just infinite score attack, and that is pretty lazy.
Lastly, the name was kind of a cop out. No one had any good ideas on Sunday, so we just kind of left it. When I was wrapping up the submission and needed a name one of our artists pointed out that the kitchen was obviously full of ghosts. Who else would be launching toast and throwing condiments everywhere? That’s good enough logic to title an LD game Toastergeist I guess!
The Nyan
One of our artists pointed out that we had rainbow condiments, and nyan cat is a poptart with rainbows. Obviously the only logical conclusion is to implement a nyan cat mode that is activated when a poptart hits a rainbow condiment.
Okay, so this is one of those ideas that might actually be better in theory. It was and amusing to implement, so I guess that is worth something. However, that dev time could have been spent making the toast appear on the plate (probably our biggest complaint) or implementing an actual game mode.
That said, our artist made all of the frames, so nyan cat is actually toasted at whatever level of toastedness the poptart was when you fired it 
Final Thoughts
The game is pretty fun to play. If we had put a little more into it we could have added a lot more polish, but as it stands it is probably our best looking LD game. Having artists around is pretty nice. It also has music and sound effects, which, as we all know, are missing from a great many LD titles. Including the credits and pause features is always nice, so I felt like despite the simple nature of it we still had a pretty good end product.
If we can put in a little more effort next time, keep the artists, and get another sound person or two on board, I think LD27 could be a smashing success as well.
If you’d like to play and rate, you can find Toastergeist here.
Finally, this timelapse, like all of our timelapses, is solely from my perspective. I’ve tried to get some of the other members to timelapse their contributions, but I have yet to convince them to actually do so!
