I kinda feel that a Ludum Dare isn’t completed until a final post about the game you created, so I wanted to take this opportunity to do this postmortem stuff at least once, (since I didn’t use IRC chat or anything else social-related while participating in the compo)
Idea:
2D fighting game, limited to one single attack, the Hadoken! (Or as someone in the comments mentioned: “Beerdouken!”, which would probably fit better)
As an Input of the “special Move” a combination of letters need to be typed in, which get more complicated over time.
Goal:
My first goal was finishing a game within the time. I find it very frustrating to not reach your goals until the deadline (at least the minimum implemented) so I tried to cut the mechanics down as much as possible, using only one screen and creating a fast paced game.
Don’t really know how I got to the idea using beer bottles as fireballs… Probably because I was listening to The Misfits at this point and connected the whole background of the game to a punk-ish concert feeling, which fitted the goal of being “fast paced” quite good.
Cool:
Finished the game at a playable state. Thats it. No really, everything else had 1000 problems and I spend to much time on bullshit.
Shit:
– ideas come and go, but an idea worth spending the whole weekend on (with the boundaries of a given topic) is one of the hardest parts in my opinion. Spend half of the first day on it – and that sucks :/
– No difficulty settings. The word or the speed of there opponents fireballs (err… beer bottles) are handled by random numbers, which are always the same. bummer. That makes it pretty much impossible for not so fast keyboard cowboys to play.
This leads to the fact, that the game is not balanced at all or the mechanics aren’t further explored.
– Not enough sound. Especially the lack of sound effects or a visual feedback when making mistakes at typing results in confusion of the player.
– A link to an external library .txt file for the words used for input. Instead there is an hardcoded array of 20 words. Disgusting, I know.
– More content / levels / opponents . Ha, thats a good one. I spend the whole night from saturday to sunday creating one sprite sheet for a single character. Took me ages to get the Misfits skull on the shirt right:
Lesson learned: don’t do things you never did before, when having a deadline this close. And yes the role model was the original SFII Ken sprite sheet 😉
– Massive problems with implementing the (very simple) game logic. Messed up some really easy to solve coding problems (not even coding : c# within unity). With less sleep comes less concentration. This consumed the most part of the valuable time. Phew.
– Guess the list could go on, but the more I write here, the more the game looks like a piece of #*§$% 😀
If you still are interested to play, here ya go.
The good thing: In less than a minute you saw everything there is 😉 But still, I wanted it like that. So in a very strange way – did I succeed? With a lot of flaws and bugs, yes. To be honest, that feels pretty good. And even if I see the other high polished, unbelievable detailed results of people, which are so much better than my buggy entry, it’s still pretty cool to get something done within the time.
And thats all about it right 😉 ?
Wish you all happy holidays, lets see what you come up with at LD29 – See you in 4 months!
.d
PS: By the way, anyone knows why my some uploaded gifs doesn’t seem to play properly? Known wordpress problem or anything?
