I find it quite interesting to read others post-mortem, so why not doing mine!
My game is Sweet Mom, a game with quite dark humor, more based on story telling than Gameplay. There will be spoilers in this post-mortem (saying there is dark humor is already a spoiler), so if you had nothing to do in the next 10 minutes and like to do inhuman things, go play it before reading.
Okay, now that everybody has been warned, here come the spoilers!
This game is all about how you, a mom of 4 kids, will manage to get rid of them with the help of various hazards in the forest. There are supposed to be 4 ways to kill them, one for each (but they are not namely assigned, almost each of the ways work for all children), usable once only.
The idea
Happily, I didn’t spend too much time looking for an idea, since I already had some vague concepts before, and I chose one that amused me the most and that I could adapt well to the subject. In the end, reading the comments, I think it was perfect for the theme 
However, now that I knew I wanted to make a mom kill her offspring in the woods, there were several choices about how. First, I thought of some procedural personality for the children, like “this one loves to play hide and seek”, “this one lets some rocks behind him (so you could grab them and send him on a wrong path)”, but it seemed a little complicated to begin with, so I just thought of one random death, like being eaten by a wolf, and chose to begin with that, the core concept of the game: having a child die.
I made some very quick drawings (and realized at this occasion that a quick drawing from me can be much better than something I try to do really well, since I can’t draw), and very fast I had this first child I could drag around, that the wolf could eat. I added then a newborn that can’t walk (you have to carry him around), and when I could just put it on the ground for the wolf to eat while I run away, I began to be happy.
The game
I’m lucky I didn’t get into many technical issues (well I kept it quite simple on the technical side anyway), so I could go on very fast. I added the house, the dialogs, the dad, in order to have one complete game cycle:
- Talking to the dad so he gives us the name of the next kid to die;
- Going out with the kid;
- Kill the kid;
- Going inside to talk with the dad about that new dead child.
I think it’s very important to have early on something “complete”, on which you can then add anything comes to you.
From that, I spawned new kids, and began to think about new challenges. I finally gave up those specific challenges, because I wanted the player to encounter them in the order he would choose (and it was easier). I also thought about giving a lot of ways to die, so you could replay the game and find new ways, but ultimately I don’t think the game is attracting enough on the gameplay side to justify more deaths, given that some of the current ones are already tricky to find.
On saturday evening I had the game running, finishable, with three children and four ways to die.
The polish
This way, it let me the whole sunday to polish the game in any way I thought about. I began with some code polish the morning, and almost mandatory elements like a Pause menu with the controls. I then made the music with Cubase; not totally satisfied of it, although it brings that silly tone I wanted, but I was scared not to have enough time.
I made the voice-over with Audacity, trying 2 to 5 times for each sound until I was globally satisfied of it. Each character would have a generic sentence or noise, and then I also wanted to give some feedbacks on the monsters, so I added a child laugh when seeeing the butterfly, a monster noise for the “spider monster” with a death scream going along with the death animation (much fun doing this), a howling for the wolf (had to go check on Youtube what it sounds like exactly, after some disastrous attempts).
I also added something that in my opinion is primordial : that bright big reward screen with wings and party particles when you kill a child, with a satisfying little music.
Finally, after a little playtest, I added some tips and the current mission in the pause menu, fixed some other errors, and here it was, nearly 7 hours before the end.
Well, this was more like a story of my life than a post-mortem, I guess…
What went well:
- Sizable scope to allow me to have a complete experience, easily tweakable (I could add traps or children independantly).
- I kept the graphics, the particles and everything very simple, at my level, and it’s far better than if I tried too hard.
- I used a very strong structure with pawns and pawncontrollers, all of my elements inheriting from an InteractibleObject class, making me save a lot of time (for example the door and the butterfly use the same collision methods).
- Doing the voice over seemed like a mountain at first, but finally it was fun to do, didn’t take too much time, and add a real value to the game imo.
What went not so well:
- It’s my first Ludum Dare, I didn’t really know how to manage my time, if I would be able to finish something or what, and finally I could have been a bit more ambitious. However when I finished, I was quite exhausted (despite a good 8 hours of sleep) and didn’t have the courage to add new elements now that it was done.
- I could have given more advices to find all the ways to kill the children. One of them, on the bridge, could remain undiscovered for ages if the player just doesn’t walk on this side of the bridge. With the butterly, it’s hard to think about what you can do with him, but in addition to that you can feed the butterfly to the monster, and then there is no way anymore to kill your children (well, except launching them from the bridge in the water, but it was not supposed to be possible).
- I was quite stressed out when making the music, affraid it would suck or that I wouldn’t be inspired, and so when I did something that wasn’t too bad, I didn’t take the time to polish it more.
- Same with the dialogs: I wrote the dialogs very fast, and didn’t rewrite them a lot after that. In the hours following submission, of course, I had a lot of better lines coming to me…
I also made a little timelapse, if anyong is interested (I find it long and boring, but who knows, maybe you will enjoy!):
I should train on post-mortem . I feel like I have done what I was supposed to do at all.
Well, that’s too bad 😀
If you liked the game and would like to see other games from me, I have made a FB page for my personnal game dev activity. Right now there is only one other, in French only, but others will come soon! It’s here: https://www.facebook.com/3.50games
And by the way I usually test all the games of people letting me comments, so if you try mine, don’t forget to leave a word!
