Grow Your Hoard! Post Mortem – John
Our Ludum dare entry can be found here
Ludum Dare 34 was a first for me in a lot of ways. It was not just my first Ludum Dare, it was my first time acting as an artist and deploying a game to be judged! I had a lot of fun in about every aspect of the project, and I am happy with the final product.
Were there bumps? Sure! Would I go back and change a few things? Wouldn’t we all? But by and large this proved to me that making games is what makes me happy, and Grow Your Hoard I feel is a solid expression of fact for Nick and I.
So let’s talk about making Grow Your Hoard!
What went Right:
Brain Storm and Idea Buy In got us going: Nick and I just started out of the gate throwing ideas at the wall until something sounded fun. Nick started pulling up old flash games he grew up with and I spat out every idea that came to my head. As soon as we found an idea we loved, merging my desire to create some ransacking goblins with the simple gameplay of Castle Defense (An influence some of our reviewers noticed) we charged forward, and rarely got stuck because we knew what we wanted to make!
Iterative Development let us build the best product in the smallest time: One of the biggest criteria for brain storming was the come up with an idea we could build quickly and then expand upon. goblins going across the screen with arrows shooting at them, and a player controlled shield… Very simple for a couple days. By the time we’d gotten halfway through Saturday we’d already achieved that much and we knew we could do the upgrades and soldier reinforcements we’d talked about early on. Iterative development meant that we never bought off more than we could finish and polish. No where better can the Iterative Development be seen than if you look at the art in our game from the early commits to the final result. Trust me, if you can check it out, you’ll be entertained by how different the game looked even 4 hours before the game went up!
Collaboration Tools that helped us keep on task: Skype, Trello, and Git really helped us pull this off. Skype’s screen sharing made things easy to keep connected and share progress. If I needed feedback on art or got stuck with a piece of code, I could holler at Nick and share my screen. Trello was important for keeping track of ideas and prioritizing them. Things that we wanted to do went into the todo column, and we’d pull them into doing as we worked, and now we have a huge done column that shows all of our hard work. Its great to look back on, and it kept us focused as we worked.
Haxe and Haxeflixel made life easy: If you have never used it, it’s a fantastic programming toolkit that let Nick and I build the game for web and windows without changing a line of code. Haxeflixel allowed Nick and I to go charging into making the game vs waiting to get things setup. Within the first 3 hours I had the skeleton of our game stamped out while Nick learned Haxeflixel. First thing Saturday morning Nick was already swinging for the fences, and by the end of the compo was doing stuff in Haxe that made my head spin! Its a great technology to develop games and software, and I highly recommend it!
Doing the art myself: I’m not saying this because the best art was made (All of my artist friends could have made this game look 50 times better, I know some fantastic artists), but this was a great thing for me personally, and the end game didn’t suffer as a result, which is a huge win in my book. Every person that reviewed and said they loved my pixel art made me feel 10 feet tall, and that is an experience I wouldn’t trade for anything!
Equally Invested Partner: Nick is a code wizard and proved it. At no point did i feel like I was carrying him and I hope he didn’t feel like he was carrying me (Nick if you are reading this, thanks for bailing me out on the upgrade screen, I was going to drive myself nuts!). This game is a shared project and I like to think its final quality represents how well he and I worked together.
We rested: I’m reading about people burning out and pushing themselves to complete as much as possible into the wee hours. Nick has done enough Ludum Dare entries that I trusted his experience that it was not only not necessary, but a bad idea. This meant waking up in the morning refreshed and able to start working again on complex pieces of code with fresh eyes.
What went wrong:
GIMP sucks at pixel art: while far from unusable GIMP left a lot to be desired when it came to doing pixel animation. Firstly the grids you can set up in gimp don’t default to being around each pixel as they would in photoshop, which meant a little more setup time every time i needed to create a new image. Additionally i found that it was quite easy to inadvertently misaligned my sprites and required that I do corrections that I didn’t know I needed until after i recompiled my game (thank god HaxeFlixel compiles to flash and neko so quickly!).
Last Minute Hosting Issues: I have my own linux server with node running on it, and it’s been stable for the last 2+ months, but the day i went to upload the swf, it somehow was no longer running my server script! I had to pull strings to get back into the server and turn it back on, and while it wasn’t too hard, I was mentally drained at the time and would have appreciated a simpler solution
Our upgrade system was almost a mess: I should have never attempted it. Not because it was out of my ability to do, but because at the time I couldn’t grasp how it should function, whereas Nick knew exactly what it should do to work. I lost two precious hours and way too much of my good brain power to trying to piece together what the system would do, only to realize that I wasn’t meant to do it. Nick saved my butt and knocked it out relatively quickly. It made me realize that in a ludum dare, the person doing the code should be the one that can visualize it. If Nick weren’t so readily available and willing to change his focus, that would have been a disaster.
Music got repetitive: lesson learned, a 45 second loop playing forever, no matter how well it matches the game, is not enough. Our initial test was to play it ourselves on repeat and see how long it took for us to hate our lives (don’t do that, you start believing THAT is why it’s irritating you). We made it 45 minutes shockingly and thought ‘Well that’s not bad!’ Thing is, the moment we doubted the music would last the length of the game, we should have done a simple mute button because some people were more easily irritated than we were.
Balance was off due to lack of outside testing: We intended the upgrades to hold a lot of value to the player, and I still believe they do in theory. You have a greedy goblin that costs you 1 gold, but gives you 3 if he makes it across the screen. Sounds great right? Well it’s great till you realize that the bag slowing him down makes him unlikely to ever make it across. The least we could have done would have been made him worth a bit more. Our Ogres were intended to be meat shields that protected the other units from arrows. However our random high damage axes made this less effective than it should have been.
A real artist could have lead to more polished art: Like I said, I’m glad personally that I did the art, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world. That being said, before the competition began I should have probably pursued a few of my artist friends to do if nothing else some touching up of what i started. The Ogre in our game has only 2 frames because I was creatively exhausted after doing the all the other units, and the soldier, which had the most extensive walking animation at 6 frames, also ended up the least polished because I was just plain DONE by the time it came his turn to be touched up.
Overall, the process went smooth. The things that went wrong feel minor, while the things that went right feel both plentiful and significant. Nick and I produced a great game in my opinion, and we did it without wanting to chuck anything at anyone! I’ve got a small list of things I’d change next time, but I feel very proud of what we did, especially considering neither of us lost sleep trying to get this thing out the door. For those of you who played our game, thanks for playing, we hope you enjoyed it!
Really Cool Enough!!(if these star can blink,this may build more great atmosphere~☆ﾟ)