It’s a bit late for a postmortem, being 3 days till the end of voting, but I have been wanting to write one and have been to busy to get to it so here we go.
Overview
First of all I’ll start off by saying this was my first Ludum Dare, and really my first game jam; I’m really happy that it went successfully for me. Now let’s get into it, starting Ludum Dare 27 I had an idea of what I wanted to do. I had this idea that I would have a zombie game with no violence from the player, sort of an obstacle avoidance game. I started working on it right away. Fortunately I quickly realized that this idea could not be realized in the 48 hours given. I quickly came up with an idea for a basic stealth game (with some inspiration from friends, of course). My initial vision for the game was huge, I had to lay down and count to ten before I could calm down and start to shrink it down and I think I made sacrifices in the right areas. If you are interested you can go play the game here.
What I Would Change
Going through the development process I spent a lot of time testing for bugs myself and fixing them in programming which led to other areas of my game, such as art and sound, suffering. I think the best thing to do would be to have some people to test my game for me. Unfortunately I don’t really have the resources for that yet. Another thing I would do is to establish a code base before starting development; I found myself rewriting scripts I had written a million times before. As for the game I’m not quite sure what I would change; I felt like it had a good game mechanic and is simple enough to be played easily, yet complicated enough to make for interesting game play. I would have liked to add more to Night Stalker: implement some obstacles, bigger levels, more interesting scenery, etc. Even though I did not get everything I wanted implemented I feel like it was a great first run and an amazing confidence booster; with the compo I had that urge to make a game again, to create a world, and I did and it felt great.
Post Compo
After the compo I took a step back from my PC for awhile, I attended PAX Prime here in Seattle, had some friends over, and brewed on the idea of continuing development on Night Stalker. Now that the judging is almost over, and I’ve been getting mostly positive feedback and good criticism I think I’m ready to work on a post-compo version of the game. I want to take it a step further though. I’m shifting all my extra time that I usually use for experimentation and slowly piecing together another game of mine to work on a more realized version of Night Stalker (perhaps a name change to something a little less “disturbed teenage boy” ) . I plan on adding some “dimension” quite literally and also some more depth in the game play and story areas. If anyone is interested in checking it out I’ll be doing updates as I go on my website bearmacstudios.com. if you read through all of this I seriously commend you and thank you. I wish I could have participated more in the community, but perhaps I’ll embrace it more come next compo.
Until next time,
Hunter “Mactinite”
tl;dr
Ludum Dare 27 was amazing, check out what I made if you want here, and I’ll be expanding upon this idea and detailing it on my website bearmacstudios.com
<3
