The Particle Swarm by KamuKuda — Post Mortem
Hey, we too made it! Check out our Flash game The Particle Swarm submitted after 65 hours of development and design %) Let’s play and vote!
And here’s how it went:
THEME +/-
We were a little disappointed to find out ‘Minimalism’ won as we’d been hoping for something more exciting. But we brainstormed for 30 min, came up with several ideas, and settled on a puzzle game with 2D physics—a player would need to direct swarms of particles to black holes. Unfortunately, we failed to put any kind of story behind the game (like, why the particles need to travel, and how the situation develops from level to level).
TEAMWORK +
We divided tasks between the three of us: 1) programming the game itself, 2) programming a level editor, 3) designing and preparing media files, including UI elements. So everyone minded his/her own business, sharing the results with the rest of the team when ready. Occasionally we all came together to fight about this or that, which in most cases was called for and helped our progress 
GRAPHICS –
The visual design part appeared difficult—nothing seemed to both look good and comply with the theme (hand-drawn images that we enjoy wouldn’t work this time). The simple-shapes-in-real-space idea only dawned on me at the very end of day 1, which was rather late really.
SOUND +
Once we decided how it was going to look and feel, the music and sounds came easy enough—just found here and there, not made.
DEVELOPMENT +/-
The programming process went well on the whole. First, we wanted to employ Box2D, but then switched to Nape for productivity’s sake, which was the right decision! We did make a mistake of working too independently on the tasks of developing the game and the level editor—we should have shared both the materials and the code. But the integration went smooth anyhow. It’s good we used GIT for version control, even though no serious conflicts occurred this time.
MISC +
We were lucky—no power outages happened while we were jamming!
Also, we had 2 beta-testers, and they even took care of the team by feeding us A great many thanks to the guys!
= LESSONS LEARNT =
We should, of course, improve all of the things marked negative above. In addition, next time we have to allocate more time to level design and testing. Also, we should think the gameplay through better, in more detail, before starting to code—this will allow us to make fewer over-corrections and changes, which are at times confusing and always time-consuming.
LD, thanks for the fun and challenging experience!
It’s the hardest thing for perfectionists…