Hey Ladies and Gentleman, I suppose I should join in and do a Post-Mortem of Starbinder.

(This is coming from one of the four people involved with Starbinder so you may see another from a different point of view. I was the artist. This was my first Ludum Dare Game Jam)

Things that went right!

1. We did it! We finished the game!
2. It ended up having most of the functionality that we wanted.
3. We also got every piece of art that we need in.
4. So far, from the reviews it seems we were able to get the style of gameplay that we wanted AND people seem to be enjoying it. (super happy about that last part.)
5. The team had really good communication, despite not being in a centralized location. (We used google hangouts the entire weekend)
6. We kept in mind scope and keeping that under control. This helped us define exactly what we wanted and made sure we got it done.

Things that went wrong…

1. We spent six hours making a different version of this. It was based on naval combat.
   1. The reason we had issues with this was spherical pathfinding. Which proved challenging.
   2. At about 4am on the first night we decided to adjust our gameplay.
2. We had a shift in artstyle at the same time as gameplay.
   1. Originally I wanted to have a realistic texture set and stylized meshes. However with the repetitiveness of the terrain that simply wouldn’t work. The eye could easily see the repeating patterns.
3. I didn’t track what I accomplished.
   1. I notice towards the end that one of the programmers had been taking screenshots every couple of hours as well as writing down what he had finished. I really wish I had thought to do that. On the last day we made a list of what needed to be finished and as I worked through it I could feel the momentum building simply because I could see that I was completing tasks
   2. I think tracking everything I did would have definitely help my moral there after the massive lack of sleep.

All in all, I am very happy with the turnout. It was fun, we had a lot of laughs, and I think there is something special about Starbinder.

(Gameplay)

I’m willing to answer any questions you may have.

Game Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/battle-buzz

Here is a quick little post-mortem-thing for the weekend from the team.

Hunter - With the jam just about over, it is time to get Battle BUZZED! This was a tough weekend for sure. A lot was learned and a lot was accomplished. I think we scope creeped pretty hard though. An RTS prototype in 72 hours is definitely a lot to program for one person, on top of handling the art, and procedural world generation. Fortunately at this point, all systems are very isolated and now more content/mechanics can be added fairly easily.

Alex - Well folks this weekend has been full of fun, puns, and lack of sun. Never have I ever felt like such a big beautiful bee (I've literally been recording bee noises for hours on end). Though the jam has come to an end I think Hunter and I would both agree this project has just bee-gun (sorry I had to slip a pun in). If you like the music in the game make sure to check out the links below! https://soundcloud.com/arkamusofficial http://arkamusofficial.bandcamp.com

Chris - When asked for a comment "nah".

We hope to continue work on the project and possibly bring on a couple friends to help ease the current bottlenecks.

Thanks for reading!