This was a fantastic compo for me. I had a quick, solid idea and got a almost all of it implemented. I had a lot of fun, because that’s what games are all about right? 😉 This is my game at the end:

I also learnt a lot, and just wanted to share some of that now.

Before the compo I got sick. I still wasn’t in the best of health during, and my work suffered as a result. The biggest thing that could have helped was just being healthier. Getting good sleep the week before and eating well would have made a huge difference. The rest of my pre-compo preparation was pretty good. I had everything I needed and was fully up to speed on Unity3d and the libraries I was going to use. I wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t already done before, so there was a minimum of stumbling and trying out random things.

The idea was solid, but parts of it were unusual. I started with a grid-base approach for the circuits because I thought it would be easier, but it ended up being way too many polygons on screen for very little gain. I scrapped that and just went with a free-from approach, which I liked better and worked better. Unfortunately, there were technical problems with the circuit implementation, which caused me to stumble a lot. I spent several hours of the first day trying to solve fancy technical problems that ended up being mainly cosmetic. This was a bad idea as it soaked up way too much time which could have been put to better use actually getting more gameplay in. I saved the gameplay to last, because it relied on a lot of the technical stuff, but I should have focussed on getting that in as soon as possible. I also thought too much about how to code something, rather than just coding it. The work I did in the last 8 hours was far more efficient than the whole first day. Funny how a deadline does that.

As for the graphics, thankfully I went with computer chips, which are fairly easy to model, but I didn’t get all of them complete. Two are untextured and the models for the enemy spawner and power conduit didn’t get finished. The circuit graphics look pretty great, but I could have focussed on them a little more. On the flip side, I just simply ran out of time to get sound and music into the game. I avoided music as I can’t make it, but next time I’ll investigate the automatic music generators out there. As for sound, I could have made some quickly and got them into the game, but just didn’t make it.

I feel if I had another 4 hours, I could have got more done, but that’s not really true, I just would have taken 4 hours longer. Better use of the time is the way to go, and that was the biggest lesson from this LD. Of course, after the post-compo tiredness wore off, I thought up fixes and ideas and ways to improve the game. If there’s enough interest I’ll turn it into a proper title.

So the major things learned were:

• Be healthier!
• Code the core mechanics first, worry about niceness later
• Reserve time for content creation, not just programming
• A solid, clear idea is golden

Thank you to all the great people in the LD community, and double thank you to the people in the LD irc chat. You guys are awesome! This was my best LD yet, and I’m very very much looking forward to the next one.