Black Hole Runner is my Ludum Dare 27 entry, it’s about black hole and time dilation. I found almost everyone complains the slow vertical movement, which is caused by time dilation. To me, the slow movement has its reason, that’s just what I want, a slow motion effect. But why players don’t like it and how can I improve it?

The biggest mistake I made is let players waiting. Games should keep players busy, from receiving information (visuals, audios, texts and emotions) to taking response, always let them having something to do. Even in the turn based game like Go, in opponent’s turn, player have lots of brain work to do.

Yes, time dilation slow down spaceship’s movement, I can’t make it faster under this precondition, but I can give player more works. I found below possible solutions.

* Adding a laser weapon to break the asteroids.
* Pressing UP and DOWN to move a spaceship is so easy, increase the apm.
* Adjust the speed of background music to the in game time speed, emphasize the dilation situation.
* Adding fancy visual effect to attract players attention.

Tags: Black Hole, Ludum Dare, time

Hey everyone,

IMPETUS, our LD27 submission, was programmed to die (after being kept alive by its players) and went out with a bang after almost 12 hours. I wrote up a post-mortem for everyone interested in how the idea came about, how the game suddenly became insanely popular and why it had to die.

Read the post-mortem here.

For those who weren’t able to play it and would like to see how the game looked like when it was still alive, I put together a little gameplay video:

(Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgdcQO6ZIbI)

Thanks for playing!

Tags: death, impetus, post-mortem, space

Got the web version of my game working! Play it here.

I’ll be writing a long post looking back at my first Ludum Dare today. Has been great fun and a lot learned.

Play and rate the game here

What went wrong

• 3 games in a weekend. My first idea was to make a Dungeon Master like game where the labyrinth changes every 10 seconds. But I gave up the idea after a few hours because of some problems I encountered with the pseudo-3D engine. Then I switched to a top down arena shooter where the gameplay rule changes every 10 seconds (like “pick the enemies to score and avoid bonuses”, “going to the left is forbidden”, …). The idea seamed cool in theory but proved to be really frustrating and not fun to play. Gave up again. And I finally got the Proletarian Ninja idea. I lost almost one entire day on these.
• Motivation problems. After the second abandoned idea (arena shooter), I decided to give up completely and went back home. I was really really down… Until I found my third gamedesign idea. I’ve been doing the LD for almost 3 years now. I love making games, and when I felt “bored” by the second game idea, I was really depressed. But I misinterpreted that feeling: it was not me being bored by Ludum Dare, it was just my game idea sucked.
• Music & sounds. I used LabChirp for the sounds, and tried a few things with AutoTracker. The final result is pretty weak and I didn’t keep the music part (sounded really too “AutoTracked”). I will definitely HAVE to work that part for the next LD.
• The theme. This theme had, in my opinion, a major problem. Most of the games you could make with a 10s constraint were actually better and funnier without the 10s constraint.
• A good friend of mine gave up. Benjamin was working on a point-n-click game, verb-based like Monkey Island. The art and the idea were both amazing, really. But he had to give up because of technical and code architecture problems. Point-n-clicks are really tricky to create.

What went right

• LD 24h. In fact, because of all of the motivational problems listed above, I actually made Proletarian Ninja in about 24-30h. Which is really cool
• Stealth and action. I’m a total fan of games like Thief, Dishonored and Trilby. So I’m really happy and proud of the way Proletarian Ninja X plays and feels. I would really love to expand this gameplay further (probably without the 10s time constraint).
• Level design. Creating the levels was rather easy (not fun, but easy), and I liked the fact that, even without real intent from my side, there was usually always a solution. So I usually created a level quite randomly, tried it, and if I could complete it, it was validated. Then i roughly sorted the bunch of levels based on a difficulty “feeling”.
• Haxe 3. The new features of Haxe 3 are really cool: abstract types, macro, maps… I will post a few articles about that soon.

Since many of you, eager to know more of the plot, could not wait the 2.5 seconds between dialogs.

I have made a PostCompo version with skippable text

Play “Back to you” here

Thank you very much for your comments!

(You can try the game here!)

What was good:

The theme:
Simple and concise as it is, was unexpectedly easy to quickly find motivation and inspiration to get to work, and I think if this is my first game ended LD has been precisely because of the simplicity of the theme.

The idea:
I started to work six hours late, but I had a clear idea as soon as I read the topic. I will not say it’s the most original idea in the world, but it was an easy idea with possibilities, and possible to do in a short time.

What was wrong:

Bugs:
I have worked in platform games before, but had always depended on outside code when dealing with collisions and such matters, which has led to cause several somewhat annoying bugs in the game (one commenter informed me that sometimes enemies suddenly teleport: I couldn’t fix that in time, but I think it is related to the code that prevent enemies to spawn within a platform. I have intention to continue working on this game (I want to make an HTML5 version) , and will do my best to fix that.

The Movement:
Several people have told me that the character moves too slow and jumps too high. I disagree about the speed of movement, but I could have improved the jumps.

The level design:
I’m horrible at this.

What was amazing, good, great and other synonyms for awesome:

The response from the community:
I know I will not get into a good position, but I don’t care. Simply reading positive feedback about something I have done, knowing that someone is enjoying my work, is a great feeling.
And, finally, thanks to that I will be participating in the next LD!

Tags: post-mortem

(Spoiler gameplay video)

I present to you, Legend of Troll

This game took me 3 whole days, only managed to implement one of the 10 levels I planned, and injured my index finger.

But it was SO worth it! I’m so proud

Stay tuned for more levels, and a post-mortem /making of. I promise you it’s worth your while.

If you haven’t voted for my game yet:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=13139

Tags: screenshot, success story

This has been my second LD and I’m very glad things went so well.  My last LD ( #25 ) was so horrible it couldn’t even play and I didn’t get ranked at all.  This time around things went incredibly well.  Here, I’m going to break down what good and bad happened.

The Good:

1) Getting a platform engine set up.  I had a solid engine in the first 3 hours of the LD and that was good for a number of reasons.  First of all I had an idea of the direction of the game.  It cut down on the number of ideas I had to sift through to get the right one.  Second, I could start making the game immediately.  This meant also that I could get a better idea of what my game was going to be.

2) Deciding on time warps.  The other major idea I had was having a platformer gauntlet where you had to get to a checkpoint in 10 seconds, then get to the next.  When I woke up on day 2, I realized my idea for having 10 seconds to do a level, but having the ability to warp back ( essentially a poor man’s Braid ) was far superior both in level design possibilities and in general innovation and creativity.

3) Utilizing streams to get playtesting.  I was often on dvcolgan’s stream, which meant I could talk to 50 + people.  This meant I could upload my game continuously and see what I needed to change.  I got suggestions that ultimately improved my game a lot, such as a suggestion to rename “respawn” to “warp” which made the main game mechanic far less confusing.

4) Having a final boss.  This was probably my best decision, even though it cost me 10 hours that I could’ve spent on more levels.  I was planning on finishing the game by just having a room with the Golden Scepter on  platform, but having a final boss changed a lot.  This meant the game ended with a challenge, that added a level of meaning to getting the Golden Scepter.

5) Spending monday off the computer.  By the time I had uploaded my game, I was practically seeing the world in lines of code and numbers.  By monday, I was almost content with never seeing a computer again.  So I took monday to walk, read a book, spend some time with my family, and away from this damned machine.  Very good idea.

The Bad:

1) Hacking in the boss.  I’m pretty sure the way I did it halved the games performance.  I was running 200 fps before the boss, but once I implemented him and hacked in a terrible lever system to accommodate for the fight, it ran 100 fps even when you weren’t fighting the boss.  I’m sure if I just created a separate entity for the lever instead of hacking the block class to do what I wanted, and made a simple boolean to check if I was in the boss room, then the game would have performed fine.  Instead I ended up losing tons of frames to a hackjob that made the game run like crap.

2) Being sick.  I had no control over this but my cold really did cut down on the quality as I ended up spending a lot of time sleeping and medicating myself.

3) Cookie Clicker.  I wasted so much time on that dumb game.  In fact, as I type this, I have it open in one of my tabs.  It is pretty much the death of productivity, so tinkering around with it made me lose so much time.  I bet I could have had 20 levels instead of 15 if I had never played it.

So that’s the good and the bad.  If you want to play Time Wizard, just click this link : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=6412

So It was my first LudumDare ever, even though I have tried to take part in the past one with theme of “You are the villane “I came up short of Ideas, and I called quits in the first day, and I think what prevented me from creating my first entry back then is the fact that I haven’t created any game before, but this time I came ready with 5 games under my belt, four of them were part of much smaller Game Jams then #LD48.

When the theme “10 Seconds” been announced even though I voted -1 , but I was excited because the possibilities was as wide as the Human Imagination , the Idea of my game came when I was discussing the theme with my sister , a game where you can control the game monsters for 10 seconds being in my mind before but I let it go because the huge amount of content I had to make in order to do it justice , but I thought that this was the best Idea I have so far and I better start working ,I took a pen and a paper and I wrote a small to-do list , after making five games using to-do list I started to understand the time line that is needed for each to-do list .

I use the excellent Construct2 HTML5 game engine, it have a built-in platformer engine so I was able to start on the switching to monsters after an half an hour (with graphics of the main character being made ) , the mechanism had two main parts; the monster behavior when it is controlled and when it is not ,but it wasn’t very tricky therefor I was able to finish it with 3 types of monsters with their graphics ,but the tricky part was believe or not the magic balls maker , I just couldn’t find a good way to make it behave properly  ,so I made a crapy one that was “close enough” and called it the day.

I get up with sun the next day (I always am) , refreshed after a good night sleep ,I had the levels next on my to-do list ,so I took my pen and paper to the garden in my house and started sketching the levels ,I was shooting for 4 levels so I sketched them out , and started working , the graphics being my weakest attribute ,I needed a simple to make pretty art style that goes well with my pixel art elf , and Limbo came to my mind with it dark art ,so black colored art it is .so when six PM rolled around (I take a lot of breaks ,I watched a soccer match too to ease the pressure too)  I had my four levels finished lacking sound but playable , so I had my brother and two sisters to play it (I don’t have Internet in my house because a major telephone lines replacing that took 6 months so far XD)  thanks to them major level  design bugs have been found and fixed that I didn’t even noticed them at all , I added sound by using Bfxr and made a quick music loop using fruity loops and upload .

This was our first Ludum Dare as a team, and the first Ludum Dare ever for 2/3 of us, and we’re so pleased with how things went!

The idea of our game is that you plan out your turn and then watch it play our over the course of 10 seconds. You get to select your ships’ flight path, where to fire, and can divert/prioritise power between shields and fire-power if you like. Repeat. The first team to destroy the other wins!

Here’s a gif of our game doing some things:

Click the image to play!

Anyway, let’s dive in shall we?

The Good:

• We’ve created a game that we find fun to play, and that will serve as the basis of a future project.
• We’re happy with the overall visuals, including a parallax background.
• We managed to implement ship variations with different characteristics. These include: differing health, movement, damage, and AI behaviours.
• We find the ability to divert power between Shields and Firepower to be a really neat feature. We didn’t think we’d get around to implementing it!

The Bad:

• As a team we weren’t always on the same page. It’s hard developing over Skype when tired.
• There is no sound, which is a bit of a problem. Its lacking existence is definitely something we regret, and something we’ve all vowed to improve on vastly.
• The planning phase is not the most intuitive system, and could really do with an overhaul.
• The game would benefit greatly from a tutorial, or more in-depth instructions.
• Multiple levels with a difficulty curve would have been an ideal way to introduce game systems and slowly ramp up the amount of units.
• The screen is a little too tight. A wider view, or the ability to zoom in and out, would be a greatly beneficial.

What we’d like to add:

• Music and sounds – Bleeps and bloops and perhaps electronic “target selected” voices. That sorta thing!
• Improved Movement System – one that shows you how far the ship can move in the period of 10 seconds, to allow for more precise planning.
• Ship upgrading and purchase – An upgrade or ship purchase system between missions, perhaps with each ship having a certain amount of points to allocate between various stats and slots for upgrades.
• More specialised ships – We’d like ships to to able to use special abilities, or provide some kind of bonus when in the radius of certain other ships (or sometimes if not in a radius).
• Friendly Fire – We’d like to find a middle ground. Not too much damage dealt to yourself, but there still should be the penalty. We’re very into the idea of having the smallest ships not deal friendly fire to one another when fighting as a close unit.
• Improved Power diversion – The ability to divert power between Shields, Firepower, and Thrusters would be pretty rad.
• Multiplayer – Yes, multiplayer would be grand.
• Radar – This would be a nice way to figure out location of enemies and allies really quick, or incoming asteroids.
• Slight Auto-aim – It would be worthwhile for us to investigate a slight bias towards the bullet flow.

So there we have it! We’re so chuffed with the feedback we’ve received, and we can’t wait to work on the game further, right after we get another project out the door first.

Ludum Dare has proven to be such a great community, and the weekend was so motivating and inspiring. It’s been a growing experience and we’ll be back for more!

If you’d like to play Cosmic Commander, you can do so HERE. Bonus points to anyone who spots a rare cameo!

– Unorthodox Games

I recently discovered that my game, North Exit, has a large, game-ruining bug; I somehow omitted the code for detecting a lose condition, so the player can’t lose the game (no, no that game, but yeah).

However, that doesn’t really make the game unwinnable or less playable — it just makes it infinitely easier.

My plea for help is: is it okay to re-upload the game with that single bug fix? Will that break any Jam rules? I know the Jam is relatively lax on rules, but I just want to be doubly sure. :’D

Thank you to anyone who’ll reply! I’ll go ahead and play your games too if you respond! <3

Tags: bug, bugfix, jam, north exit

I made a gameplay video of my entry Demon Infiltration, you can see it here:

 (Click on the picture)

Video quality is low so if you have time I recommend play the game before see it.

The feedback are appreciated

Demon Infiltration Entry

This was my first LD and I’m very proud of what I made.

What was good:

The idea:

I started to work 10 hours late , but I had a clear idea when I started.

My engine:

In general, the use of my engine was efficient. I had learn a lot of new things and I will update my engine with that.

xTile library:

The use of xTile library was very easy. It’s help me a lot for the displaying of my map.

What was wrong:

Collision detection:

I had a lot of problem with my collision detection. At first, the collision detection worked around 50% of time. I found the solution at the last day. That was a very simple problem. I didn’t take the right coordinate so the collision detection was offset.

Level too short

I didn’t have the time to make a longer level.

What was very good

All the comments from the community. Thanks everyone !

The future

I will participate in the next Ludum dare and before that, I will continue to work on my game to make it better. I would like to add more levels, power-up, obstacle and other stuff that I have in mind.

Conclusion

If you didn’t played my game, give it a try : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24796

Gratz to everyone that made a game in the last LD. I have try a lot of game and there is a lot of good games.

Tags: postmortem

If you want to play the game, you can play it HERE.

If you want me to play your game, leave me a comment with a link to it.

The Aliens Came — Postmortem

I had lots of fun this Ludum Dare! It was my second LD, my first in the compo, and I was quite happy with my results this time.

I wrote a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game about a citizen in a city that’s been invaded by aliens, and having everything conspire to make you revolt.

What went wrong:

• The timer for choices was the source of my original idea, but didn’t fit in the final product as well as I’d like.
• The timer shouldn’t have been on all of the choices, but I didn’t have time to make a system to disable it for some multiple-choice scenes.
• I created too large of a story to make art for in the time limit. With drawing as fast as I could for almost the entire second day, I still had to reuse art for about 1/3 of the game.
• The default font was broken on one of my test computers, so I made my own. I’m not really qualified to design fonts however, so it’s a bit harder to read than it should be for large blocks of text.
• I didn’t automate the resource handling quite well enough, so that slowed down some of my work.

What went right:

• I came up with a very achievable idea that was still interesting.
• I built an extensible system straight off, so making the content for the game was easy.
• I wasn’t overconfident, and used Unity again. I got all my cross platform compatibility for free, even though I didn’t make much use of the Unity editor and only  used one GameObject for my game.
• I built a flexible level format, and was smart enough to leave the linking to the user, instead of trying to make a really complex automatic link maker.
• I came up with an art style that I could successfully produce 80-something pictures in in only 16 hours, and it looks quite nice too.

I had a great time this Ludum Dare, and I’ve played lots of fun games. I’m excited to see the results, and eagerly awaiting next time. I’ll be ready.

Tags: I will play your game, play my game, post-mortem, postmortem

No Time to Stop is a classic puzzle where you can’t turn until you hit a wall, with an additional 10 seconds time limit. This was not just to follow the theme, it added something I love in puzzle game: optimizing solution. You also need to smash keys in fast sequence, which I am not a fan in music games, but here I liked it, because instead of simply following a track, you actually design the sequence and replay it using both memory and quick thinking. The game was done in less than 24 hours and has 10 levels offering a hard challenge.

What went wrong:

Lost 24H on another idea (a dirt racing game). The car drifting mechanic was done when I realized that a 10 seconds lap was too short to be fun. I scrapped that and fell back to something more easy to tweak and simple enough to be coded in 24H. Don’t give up, try plan B instead.

How to win. I suspect that some players didn’t understand how I intend the game to be played. You are supposed to ignore the time limit when searching the solution and then replay it quickly. I think some people directly stop and retry after 10 seconds, probably because it looks like you are supposed to do that (death sound and a red retry message, even if you are still free to move). Others seem to plan mentally before the start. I admire that chess-like spirit and it’s how I designed the level in my editor, but it makes some levels very hard. Don’t assume that players will play the “fun way”.

The difficulty. Because 10 seconds was a fixed limit, it was hard to balance the levels (IMHO that was a general problem with the theme). So, during development I tested with 8 seconds and added hotkeys to tweak that time limit if needed. Unfortunately this is not visible in the interface and some people will not see it in the description. Always show hotkeys in-game.

What went right:

Easy to code. This time it was really refreshing to have a game straightforward to code. My previous LD always had some tricky physics problems, which are often hard to tweak. Here, the core mechanic is very simple, and adding special blocks was just few lines. Pick an idea easy to fully prototype early.

The graphics. During most of the development, it was just a grid of colored squares, good enough to prototype, maybe even to release. I only added sprites in the last few hours. A simple trick with good payoff was the line behind the player. This obviously helps to follow your moves, but before that, there was no animation (for fast gameplay and easier coding), and that tiny effect really added a lot of life to the game. Always add a cool effect to the main action.

The levels. I really had a lot of fun creating them, and a simple pixel editor was enough. I am also happy about their number and variety. Without testers, it’s hard to balance but they are small, so hopefully determined players can finish the game. Making levels is fun and important, keep time for that.

Conclusion:

This LD started bad but ended well. My advice to people who give up during LD because their initial ambitious project failed: instead try to make a very simple idea in the short amount of time left, it’s very fun too.

Play it!

First things first: I’m happy about how the game turned out – it’s the first time for me that I finished a Ludum Dare game as I initially designed it, without cutting any features.

I worked with my girlfriend on ‘Dungeon Deadline’ and she helped me a lot coming up with the idea and refining the gameplay elements, while she designed all levels beautifully as well.
As you probably can immediately tell, I’m using Oryx famous ‘LoFi Fantasy’ set – the same set that many other games use (for example ‘Realm of the Mad God’ & ‘Legends of Yore’) so this part was settled. For the audio I asked Landon Podbielski for help and he composed a wonderful tune for it.

I’m very grateful to those two guys, since all that you see and hear in my game was made by them.
(besides the impromptu sound effects and some minor graphics that I did)
So my job was coding and actually developing that whole thing – and it took some very long hours to do so. however – since I’m by now basically fluent in the Flashpunk engine I was coding at an amazing speed and was surprised of myself for a few times – loved it.

Despite being a overall very positive experience I also had some minor downsides:
The code looks like hell … I’m always starting out neat and organized and end up hacking stuff together in a way that should give any compiler a heart attack. It’s still memory-leak proof and more or less reasonably performance optimized though.
Some of the features are a bit buggy, or at least under-developed – one of them being the warrior attack. It’s a bit unbalanced and simply not very well done – but I kept putting it off and ended up having to keep it like it is now. Please try out the other two classes to play the game in a balanced way.

After reading the comments that I got by now I’m happy to report that people generally like my game – some seem to like it quite a lot

Several people suggested that the time limitation hinders the potential of the game – since they want to explore the dungeons in a more traditional RPG way. While I certainly understand that feeling – this is simply an other type of game and the theme of this Ludum Dare is ’10 seconds’ after all. However – I might develop this further and ditch the time limitation to include up/down stairs and a shopping – which should make this a much more classical dungeon crawler. We’ll see.

I also have to thank the whole Ludum Dare community – all of you are awesome!
It’s amazing that so many games got made and I’m going to take my time playing as many as I can over the next days.

Have Fun!

The third and final entry in my Spacetime Adventure Post Mortem is now available.

You might find it interesting. For example:

I expected a pleasant weekend’s amusement, a chance to test my skills and, if they didn’t fail me, to show off a bit. I did not foresee how much I would learn, how delightful I would find the actual process, or how meaningful it would be to discover the often amazing, beautiful, clever, and entertaining games that others were creating.

See whatcha think.

Achievement Get: Beaten LD48 3 times!

So I joined LD again this time around with probably my best LD game so far! But as every game it has it’s good and bad sides.

What worked well:

There is nothing quite like it: Soo.. seen any other game when you play as a candy vaccum cleaner where you clean dust on big spheres of lollipops in outer space in another dimension…. I thought so! Having a game stand out among over 2000 games is quite a good thing.

Unity3D gives a lot of advantages:My two last games was made with Game Maker 8.1/Studio but this time took the summer and learned quite a bit about it. So because of it I could easily export to the web and beef up the graphics in a way I couldn’t have done with Game Maker.

The aesthetics, both easy to make and enjoyable: Around like 6 hours in I got the base idea to what would become the end product after 2-3 other ideas but most of the graphics was easy to make. The textures was easy to make, adding space took me barely 10 minutes and I found a great font that worked well with the game . The only thing that took time to make was the vacuum cleaner as I changed around quite a bit until I got the final version.

Easy to learn what to do: When a level only takes 10s to play you need to learn what do to quick and I feel that I achieved that.

Voice acting, quick to do but adds a lot: One thing I had a blast to do was adding voice acting to the game. I added a small countdown with a silly cute voice and so far it seems like the thing that people liked the most of it.

I leaned a lot!: Even if this would have been the worst game ever it would have been worth it because I learned a lot about game design, 3D game design and Unity.

What didn’t work well:

Waaaaaayyyyy to many hours used on stuff not appearing in the final product: This is something I had problem with every LD I’ve joined so far but doesn’t make it less painful. I spend around 4 hours with stuff that didn’t had much to do with the final game and and around half of the rest of that time working with stuff that didn’t end up in the final product.

Hard to control: As the creator I was used to the controls so I didn’t think of it that much. Even when I showed it to my family and they had problem with it I simply brushed it off…. Big mistake as that’s the most common complaint

Making a game based of a sphere gives a button of problem: I had the idea to have a game on a sphere for a while because it seemed easy and seemed really cool. I got right on the cool part but easy…. nah. Placing down everything takes so much more time because you have to rotate everything around the sphere and that made the level design take so much longer time than would otherwise. The visibility was limited so the levels became quite limited and I wanted to add walls but I.. just couldn’t….

Too level based… Yet again: For the last LDs I have made games that relied a lot on having a lot of content instead having clever design that didn’t as much content building… I felt that it was a mistake and didn’t want to do that again…But yet again I did it. At least I felt that was that would work the best with the 10 seconds theme.

Makes some people dizzy/nauseous: Not exactly something that I intended but some have reported that and that’s just…

Anyways. For people that haven’t checked it out yet I’d love to see you check down the game. (Link below)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=18652

Tags: postmortem, unity, unity3d

The overall rating should be calculated based on all other specific ratings. It just feels strange.

Game
Could the theme “10 seconds” be interpreted as 10 individual seconds? Could a game be made where something interesting could happen inside of 1 second? From those questions came Snap Encounters, an RPG with no RPG elements due to lack of time.

Was the experiment a success? Feedback so far is pretty unanimous: 1 second is too short to make a real decision and there’s too much text.

Too Much Text
Since this is a story-based game, that’s like saying an FPS has too much shooting. Since reading is a free action and isn’t timed, I’m not sure this is a valid criticism or just an issue of wrong target audience. I can certainly tweak it a bit since my writing does tend toward verbosity.

1 second is too short
As implemented, a player must examine the 32×48 pixel encounter creature, examine their two 48×48 pixel choices, interpret all that, and pick a choice appropriate for the encounter. All within one second. Since there’s no HP, making the wrong choice means you die and have to slog through the same encounters all over again (or give up and go play a more fun game).

How To Fix
I think 1 second can still work, but there needs to be a lot less for the player to process for each encounter. My tentative idea is to remove the randomized choices entirely. For each encounter you get the same three choices: fight, flee, or fraternize. The tutorial part of the game will teach these to you, so that by the time you need to make a snap decision, all you have to think about is “oh, that’s an ogre and I’m level 1, RUN!” instead of “That’s an ogre, my choices are, uh, let’s see. Oops, too late, I’m dead.”

Also, the sting of making a wrong choice will be reduced when the RPG elements are introduced. Instead of “oops, I gotta go through all that again?” it’ll be “ouch, I hope I find a health potion soon.”

Play it!
If you want to see how hard making a decision in 1 second really is, go play Snap Encounters, it’s HTML5, so should run just about anywhere that has web and a keyboard.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem