Not my first jam, but first time that I write something befor actually publishing the game

Using: Game Maker GIMP Musescore (If I have enough time for a soundtrack) BFXR (If I have enough time for sounds)

I'm trying to make a "Build and grow your own little planet" thing. Wish me luck

http://imgur.com/a/L7sTW Still WIP

So, a week passed, I got some feedback and I think it would be useful to do a post mortem on my game. It's my third game jam and my second ludum dare, but it's my first post mortem and the first time I'm really satisfied with my work.

So first of all

THE THEME I remember seeing it, not sure if I downvoted it or just kept it at zero. Not the best theme there, but not the worst and it turned out to have some interesting interpretation. I spent one hour and a half more or less on the theme. I discarded a lot of ideas, mostly about taking a genre and reducing the size of the world. I don't think it would have been too bad, but it was definetely too risky. I'm still intrigued by the possibilities of making a mini roguelike with tiny floor, but I don't think it would really have turned too good. Maybe with a lot of thinking and time, which I didn't have. Another idea I came up with was a tiny tower, with floor of 2 or 3 cells squares, but if you exclude "avoid something" I didn't really find a nice gameplay for that. Then I came up with an idea. What's little? A baby. A baby world. So my original design was more like a "planet tamagochi". Originally I was trying to really avoid the "tiny planet thing" but I liked that idea and I didn't want to spend too much time thinking about what to do. So when I started it was intended as a planet tamagochi with some simulation/management features to spice it up a bit. But it never goes as intended, so the simulation/management took completely over so it became more of a "build your planet and manage it" but the "it must survive" objective was still there.

WHAT WENT GOOD Well this time I really managed to do a lot of things right. I picked game maker, so it was a lot faster(My first jam was with SDL 2) and I managed to stay on schedule basically every time. The mouse only/no animation was really a right choice and the pixel effect of GIMP really saved everything. It turned out that some vague lines pixelated look really good. Far better then expected. And I managed to develop all the features I wanted on the beginning. I guess that the soundtrack isn't that bad too.

WHAT WENT WRONG The only mouse/no animation choice was good. The simulation/management genre was really really bad. I didn't realize until the end that was practically impossibile to do even the slightest amount of balance. I didn't even have the time to actually play it. It's probably really broken in some parts, I'm pretty sure that is not impossible to win, but I'm sure that with some analysis it becomes really trivial. So this forced me to focus on comedy and dialogue lines. And this is not a bad thing, but every time I try to do a jam I have to rely on that, it's the third time in a row and I really want to do something different next time. Also, I may have developed every feature, but for sure not every content I wanted to make. Mostly on the differences between planets, right now there is just one small difference unique to the population. And the losing/winning system is not nearly as complex as I wanted it to be. The soundtrack turned out to be not as bad as I thought, but if you are not very good at doing something it will be even harder if you try to do that 2 hours before the end and way after midnight. I was barely understanding what I was doing. Even the "turn music down" button it's basically a "please save me button". It doesn't bring the music back if you click it again.

if someone wants to try it the link is here. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/my-little-planet

If someone already tried it and is wondering why are there roasted chickens...I don't really know why that sounded like a good idea and why now it still appears to have some sort of sense in my mind. The spaghetti one was way worse, but I changed because it was too much and luckily I liked the new idea even more.

Now you can destroy planets on your browser! Or keep them alive. But let's be honest, who would want to keep them alive?

https://mindtricks.itch.io/my-little-planet-html5-

I usually don't join memes like that, but I really like this one, so. Here is mine :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/my-little-planet