Game:
Mono Cave
Description:
Mono Cave is a little game where you venture through a cave and shoot the bad dudes that get in your way! The entire game is made up of only two colors: black and white. It also features the retro sound of a gameboy synth for the music.
What Went Right:
- I completed the game. Considering I didn’t even plan on entering in the first place and worked on the game purely because it was fun to keep going, I’m very happy that I finished. It’s nice to work on a game for no other reason than it’s fun to do so. In the end I created enough content to last someone a good 10 minute play-through.
- Some people seem to like it! I’ve gotten a decent amount of compliments which makes me super happy. I have also gotten a fair amount of criticism but I think it’s all justified and it’s about things that I would have sorted given the time. I’ve found only a few people have straight up said it sucks but I can take it… Honest… :'(
- I learned a bunch. I’m not used to using flash, I generally work with java and Libgdx or game maker. (Occasional some C++ and SFML.) I found I was able to very quickly adapt to FlashPunk in combination with Actionscript. This seems to be partially down to FlashPunk being very easy and straight forward to work with. I’ve come out of this with far better skills when developing flash applications.
- I feel like I managed to stick to the theme fairly well. The graphics, sound and gameplay are all minimalistic while avoiding it being ugly and boring. (At least a little bit. 馃槈 )
What Went Wrong:
- A game breaking bug. I managed to let a bug slip which would mean picking up a key would sometimes not work. The player would then be stuck, unable to beat the level. I believe the bug is sorted at this point but it still bums me out to think many people had to deal with the frustration of things breaking. I found especially early on, many of the comments on Newgrounds where complaints of keys not working. I must have lost a fair amount of people to that glitch.
- One of the game-play decisions I made to simplify the game backfired. I decided early on that I wanted the player to only shoot in two directions and the direction would be determined by which way the player was facing. People didn’t seem to like this and would have preferred Binding of Issac style controls. I do agree that the game would have been more fun that way. Sadly by the time I realized that was the case, I didn’t have enough time to re-work the levels to fit that gameplay.
- The music is very love hate. I think this is kind of a good thing in some ways and I’m especially happy when people say they like it because of the great rush I was in to make it. I almost didn’t bother because it wasn’t going well at first and I literally only had about 20 minutes to write and implement it. The reason this is in “what went wrong” is because I realize that picking high pitch notes in such a short loop was a pretty bad idea. It really becomes annoying unless you’re into that sound. I should have probably gone for something a little easier on the ears.
- I didn’t give enough time to really take the game to it’s full potential and to the level of polish that I would want. As I mentioned earlier this was just a spur of the moment thing and I only kept going because it was fun. I feel like if I had really set aside time I could have taken the game a bit further and made it more fun. On the same note maybe the spur of the moment decision was what made it such a joy to work on.
Summary:
This was a great experience. I don’t expect to come close to the top 10% of games or even come above the top 50% but I managed to make a game with about 12-14 hours of work and enjoyed doing so. I learned a great deal and many people have said they like the game. What more can I ask for? 
