My game: Survivalism
One night’s sleep after the compo I looked at my game and found that I had neglected a ton of things that I would usually be very picky about – sleep deprivation hooray. A quick postmortem summing up what I learned already:
What worked well:
First off, I finished the thing in time, mainly because I had a clear picture of what my planned features would require and therefore had most of the crucial features working within the first day. By midnight of day one i basically thought I was done 
Here’s an impression of what it looked like after day one:
Also the enemy design worked out quite well, considering everything consists of procedural primitives. As a theme I had picked the microbiological world of cells and bacteria – which I interpreted quite loosely – and got some appealingly odd cellular shapes together farly quickly.
I also think that this take on arena shooters plays quite differently, as I turned it all into a more casual yet potentially more frantic experience. I got comparisons to bomberman and pacman have come up, for whatever that’s worth.
What went wrong:
Turns out the Timeline system I had built still invovled quite some effort to get some playtime together. Now I wish I had gone for randomised respawning and rather created a potenially endless game, even if that would have meant to give a lot of control over the pacing away. What I used essentially required me to define every enemy wave quite elaborately and lead me to reuse stuff over and over in order to get to an end.
The color palette I picked is fairly tight but the rigid reuse of all colors made the whole thing far busier and not as readable as I’d like. Items share colors with enemies, Icons are small and tend to move quite fast, all of which creates a bit of a clutter at times.
Player feedback can be misleading. The player’s attack should express the weapon config and its efficiency. Some of the more suicidal enemies tend to explode when crashing into the player which looks remarkably much like killing them. This of course makes it quite difficult for the the players to clearly judge the result of their efforts.
Survivalism Gameplay Video
Conclusion:
I learned a bunch of important lessons already and I will quite probably revise this thing after collecting some more feedback. It might not be my most monumental prject, but that makes polishing it just a bit more even more tempting.
Check the game here
