This was my entry for Ludum Dare 27. It was made in around 15 hours with most of the work done on Saturday. It is a simple arcade style game inspired by Pac-Man, but it automatically moves onto the next random “maze” every 10 seconds with more enemies added in over time.
My primary goal was to simply finish something, even if it’s not too original or amazing of a game. I’ve been participating with Ludum Dares off and on for five years, but I kept biting off more than I could chew and running out of time before nearing a completion. This time I tried to keep everything as simple as possible — a character that lacks complex geometry, has only two bones, simple animation, and minimal texture mapping. Even though I did not have the full 48 hours available to work on it, I succeeded in creating something and I consider that is a pretty big accomplishment considering how little time there was.
What Went Wrong
Because most of Saturday was spent with family before I head off to college, I was pretty much short a day. This extra time certainly could have been used to add more to the game and polish things up a bit.
I Jumped straight into development without spending much time brainstorming game ideas. Halfway through making this I came up with a few game concepts that I think could have been more fun, unique, and funny, but I didn’t have the time to scrap what I had and start over.
I kept having a weird problem on Kongregate where my game gets moved down a little and cuts off the bottom of it. No matter how I tried to change the size settings nothing seemed to fix it completely, so I just tried to have it cut off as little as I could.
Near the end, the project started to get a little hacky and messy. I was experimenting with using a heavily component based style of game design, but I wasn’t entirely certain how to handle some special case problems, since I was trying to keep everything generic with pretty much no specialized gameobject code. I think I now have an idea of how to better handle entity state switching.
What Went Right
I with into it with the plan to keep things as simple as possible. There were very few assets and what it had were extremely simple. Probably the number one reason I failed to complete any of my previous Ludum Dare projects had been because of spending too much time making too detailed of graphics, so I managed to avoid making this mistake again.
Although though there were times when I had to really push myself to keep going, development went pretty smoothly without any major problems.
I finally completed something! I first discovered Ludum Dare five years ago, and this is the first official competition game I actually finished! I also finally have something put up onto a web game site, which is kind of neat even though I don’t expect too much from it.
Conclusions
All-in-all it went pretty well and has left me wanting to make more games!
The Ludum Dare entry page can be found here:
10 Second Mazes Entry Page
The game is available through Kongregate:
Play 10 Second Mazes On Kongregate
Tags: LD27, postmortem, success, timelapse, video, youtube
