It's that time again, another ludum dare down, another chance to reflect on what we all did well and what we can improve on!
Diving right in
What went right:
- One of the best decisions we made this time around was to limit scope to a type of game we already make and a type of artstyle we're used to. This saved a lot of time and effort, and let us get thing working a lot sooner. It did limit us on gameplay somewhat, but we didn't want the mistake of last ludum dare where we tried to branch out and ended up getting lots of art done and being unable to assemble it into a game in time.
- Using additional time to plan on day 1. Last time we tried to do a more minimal design so that we could get more actual work done on the first day....disaster. We were on completely different pages for art and code, I didn't have any of the assets I needed to get anything working, sprites were the wrong size, there was misunderstandings on scene layout, etc...we decided to go ever further and just devote a full day to doing a design doc as if we were doing a full project
- Moving hosting to itch.io, not a major thing but we lost some plays two LDs ago because my server certificates expired literally in the middle of rating week, while I fixed my update script since then (oops) we figured we'll just use itch for ludum dare stuff from now on
What went wrong:
- I won't go into details but due to unforseen events outisde of ludum dare we essentially lost a full day of development, this forced us to change scope and completely re-write the script, eating up practically all the time we had set aside for polish and testing.
- While making a web version sounded great at first, and made getting lots of plays easier, it bit us bad in the end, we had lots of feedback complaining about controls and lack of music (which confused me as these were things that worked fine for us), most of this turned out to be a bug that ONLY affected the game under chrome! According to the stats almost 2/3 of our feedback was from the broken version of the game with bad controls and broken audio! For future LD events, we will be skipping making a web version as it's not reliable between browsers, it may mean less plays but at least the ones we get will be playing the game as intended.
- Due to the time issue above drawing of the hitboxes was excessively rushed, as all the rooms had to be remade within hours of submittal, this left the controls feeling REALLY bad in spots, and players missed a lot of interactions due to hitboxes not quite extending as far as they should have.
How did we do?:
Honestly...about as well as I expected in most categories, 287th in graphics with a 4.1, a bit lower than we normally are but fairly close, most other categories around 3.5. Fun and overall definitely took a serious hit due to the mentioned hitbox issue above. The categories that actually shocked me were Theme and Mood, these are normally ones we do exceptionally well on but this time around we were rated quite low, yet every single comment/bit of feedback praised us on these two things! Everything else matched the feedback fairly well, and was about what I was expecting. I do wonder how much the sound being broken in chrome hurt our mood rating.
Disappointment:
No, not in the placement, but in the quality of feedback! Now this isn't to blast the people who rated and commented on our game, you're not really who I'm talking about! It's just that practically every comment on our game was exactly the same (Graphics are great, loved the atmosphere, controls needed work). Where's the 30 other people who rated, who (statistically) liked the mood and theme far less than those that commented, what did you like...what didn't you like? As much as we appreciate praise on the artwork and reports of bugs, that doesn't really help us improve all that much, hearing about all the little things that you feel like were flawed, maybe some suggestions, talking about anything that confused you, etc, that's what we were really lacking in the feedback.
It's something that I know ludum dare has always struggled with, you want to push people to rate as many games as possible and sometimes that leads to people just going game to game spamming 3 on everything (this was a real problem in the past, I don't know how much so anymore), which is why the comments and feedback were added to the pool. Unfortunately theres still a lot of issues with this, most people only give positive comments, no real feedback, which makes it really hard to tell what people found lacking. (obviously not every comment is bad like this, just a good portion of them are). I wonder if it has anything to do with a fear of being retaliated on for disliking something?
Rankings are nice and all but the REAL payoff of ludum dare is the FEEDBACK! Feedback is how we grow as developers, One of the things I've always wanted to see is instead of ratings and comments being separate things, have per-category comments you fill out when you rate that aren't visible until after the scoring, that way we can go back later, find the lowest ratings and the comments on them and see WHY people didn't like something.
