Originally, I intended to write a post-mortem and include this timelapse recording for illustration. But apparently in these days I can find neither the time nor the energy to write such a thing. Scroll down to read it! So here is my timelapse. There are a lot of screen messages in there – enjoy!
And don’t forget to play and rate my game 😉
Post Mortem
—Tools—
Ok, I should at least give you a list of tools I used and how they worked out for me.
I made this game in Processing, and I just used the standard code editor that comes with this API. It’s probably more basic and tedious than full blown IDEs, but – at least for a small project like this – it worked pretty well.
My sprites and fonts were drawn in in GIMP. I didn’t make a lot of them (there’s just one 2×2 tileset for objects and one 3×3 for the walls), but still there are quite a few comments saying how good my game looks. I think, I kind of got a hang of how to set a good mood through interesting colors and effects programming (do your eyes bleed yet?)
For level editing I used the game itself. I implemented a tiny little editing-mode where I could just click on any point of the game window and a wall would appear there. Later I added a save_level() function where I could just press ‘s’ and save the current layout to a file. When wrapping up the game I just disabled the editing functions. I liked this method and intend to keep using it for future projects.
Sadly, there was no time to add sound to the game, but I would have used Audacity and MilkyTracker. Music would probably be unfitting, but some ambience would be nice.
—Content—
The texts that appear in between levels were supposed to add someting poetic or philosophic to my game, but I wrote them ten minutes before the deadline so the formulations are still a bit rough. The basic thoughts are already there, though.
So there was the deadline, the game submitted, but it still had no title. I came up with the word “extensionism” and googled it. I’ve never before heard about this metaphysical theory, but it sounded interesting, so I went with it. Had I found this earlier, I would have incorporated it into my game somehow.
My notebook.
What about the game mechanics? Are they fun? Are they interesting? I’m still not shure. Initially, I was quite convinced my concept would work out, but it was only bare bones and I racked my brain to come up with good additions to it. This is my main “what went wrong” this time: too much time was spent (read wasted) on doubtfully overthinking my mechanics. If there’s one thing that had to be perfect, it was the concept! And the bad thing is, it isn’t. All that crate-pushing Sokoban-likeness is just plainly tedious. Because of this, I almost abandoned the project alltogether, but luckily, my pride protected me from this fate. In retrospective I guess, I was on the right path from the beginning, and I just have to accept that 48h-games are never big, sublime masterpieces (although, some of you have come pretty close :)). Well, I’m always pretty harsh on myself, so I’m even more thankful for all the positive comments on my submission page. Apparently, I made something interesting after all.
Oops, I just recognized this text has accidentally become a real post-mortem. Forget about the very first paragraph (exept the part where I tell you to play my game. )!
Thank you for reading!
Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse
