I’m relatively pleased with my first attempt at taking part in Ludum Dare (well, first time I’ve ever taken part in a game jam!) – it seems even finishing something within the time period is a pretty big challenge in of itself, so I’m happy that I was able to finish and submit something this first time around.

One thing that is very noticeable is that this game is a bit basic, but I did not spend a great deal of time on this over the duration of the compo – only around 16 hours, which is less than half the time allotted. I was trying to balance making the game with doing other things over the weekend (which I think is a good thing – having breaks helped to prevent me from getting burned out or frustrated).

Of course, there are a whole bunch of things I could have done better and I intend to take part again in the future – so for my future self, here are a few notes about what went well and what went wrong. Having feedback from people playing the game has been very helpful and has helped me make this list, so thanks to those who took the time to post comments on Garbarrage!

The Good

– I finished something. Yay!

– There are very few bugs, considering the code was a bit of a mess (guess that’s just par for the course for this sort of thing though). The bugs that do exist don’t have too much impact on the actual gameplay.

– The idea was good for the theme.

– Overall, people seem to think the game is fun – so that’s always good!

The Bad

– I have to admit I played it safe for this compo – as I said, the game is a bit basic. I opted to build something that I knew would be simple and easy to finish – which I think maybe limited me somewhat in terms of my idea for the theme. I feel that I could have maybe been a bit more ambitious, but at the time I wasn’t sure of what I would be able to accomplish during the time period.

– Sound effects are currently bugged so are pretty annoying at the moment – sorry!

– I’m not really happy with the graphics, but I’m not an artist and I didn’t want to spend ages on art so I think it’s OK for what it is.

– Enemies are a bit boring. I should have made extra time to include different enemies or maybe a boss of some sort.

– Fridges are OP (which I could have balanced out by having enemies that are harder to kill – see above).

– I was a bit clueless about distributing my game so I haven’t really gone about it in the best way. I wasn’t able to get just an .exe on its own that would work so I had to include an installer. I think next time I will develop a game that runs on web to make it easier for people to play (maybe with something like Crafty? I’m not sure yet).

Other things that I wanted to do was to include more variety of items that had different effects and maybe provide a way to give the player a bit more control over what they were firing. During the compo I watched my friend play and he had a stream of tomatoes and ended up dying because he couldn’t do any damage… whilst it was amusing at the time, something like that could get pretty annoying. 😛

As for whether I will continue work on this game – I think it’s something may come back to in the future. I’ve got a couple of other projects to work on in the mean time, but if I come back to this I’d probably redevelop it as a nice little mobile game and include better art/sound using something like libGDX. This would also give me the chance to expand upon the gameplay that is already there and add the things that I didn’t get the time to do during the compo.