The competition has passed and voting is underway, and I can think clearly again. This 19th Ludum Dare was my first competition of its kind, and I must say I enjoyed it very much.
Timelapse on Youtube (didn’t get it to embed, somehow)
My thoughts are after the break.
When starting the competition and throughout the first day, I had a pretty good feeling about what I was doing and the ideas I had. It seemed doable in the time given, and the engine came along well. I started out with some placeholder graphics, programmed movement, camera and map pretty much the way they made it into the final game and I felt pretty good about it. I had working upgrades and resource collection to pay for those upgrades. Again, not much different from the final product. I took frequent breaks, ate somewhat well and had fun checking out the competition and reading what people were writing in IRC.
However, during the second day, I was suffering from tiredness and felt more and more panic while I discovered that the last 10% are indeed more like the last 90%. After starting out with programming in pickups and a message dialog that I could use for progressing the story, I did a lot of work on the assets of the game and made the gameplay feel more comfortable.
The reason for this was mostly my dwindling concentration. Creating graphics, putting in sounds and making the game as a whole look better was much more relaxing than actually working on story progression or combat. Thus, I really came short on providing actual content and some story. Instead of the multiple endings I was planning, I could barely manage to fit in a single one. enemies shooting at you, and you shooting back, along with the implied upgrades, also didn’t make it. The game works fine peacefully as it is, but the red aliens, supposed to be somewhat of a warrior race now look kind of stupid just moving close to the player and stopping.
So what have I learned?
Obviously, releasing a somewhat decent game within 48 hours is doable, but you have to make some cuts. For me, that probably means next time I’ll try to get as much gameplay and actual content done during the first half of the competition. After that, I guess it would be polishing and if necessary balancing a few things, and at long last adding sound and better graphics — if the time permits it.
I was definitely lucky that my engine supported most of the things I was trying to do. I hardly had to write anything very complicated. And I actually found a few minor bugs in my base code that I could fix on the way.
I’ll also have to find out how to release the game in a stand-alone way, since some people seem to be having problems with the applet.
Either way, I’ll probably keep working on the game after christmas since I do like the idea and can think of a few ways to improve upon it.
Tags: postmortem, timelapse
