Two days after the end of Ludum Dare 16 I finally write my post-mortem. And you will find it after the break.

This was my first Ludum Dare, although not my first time trying to make a game in a short time frame. Twice before I’ve participated in the 24 hour games competitions the game development club at my university holds. I must say that having 48 hours, which allows more time to sleep, is much nicer. And certainly less detrimental to one’s health.

My entry, I Never Missed Anyone Until They Were All Gone, to give its full title, is here. I never really finished it, I guess it was overambitious. Though I think that mechanically it’s where I wanted it in that you can walk around and you would be able to explore if there was actually something to explore. Drawing all the art by hand took far to long.

I would like to continue working on this. Hopefully I don’t lose all motivation now the LD is over. I think my next step will be to try and create some sort of level editor where I can assemble the the world visually and have it calculate the positions of the areas and the lines of the paths for me. Having to write out everything that defines an area by hand and typing it into text files is a pain.

I’ve noticed that it’s difficult to tell where the paths that the character follows branch, since he does follow fixed paths. I think I will keep him on fixed paths but I want to make it clearer where the paths branch. I might do this by having him stop when the path he’s following branches until the player selects one, rather than having a default path for each branch. I will have to try some things out and see what works.

Other than that the large part of what needs to be done next is creating the rest of the world, which means more art I need to draw. I’ll also need to figure out a point for the exploration as well as maybe add some puzzles or some such thing into the game to flesh it out. I’m wondering if I can design puzzles based around observing the environment, rather than necessarily interacting. This might be difficult though.

To finish here’s some photos that I couldn’t be assed to post during the competition proper.

All of the work I did off of the computer, mostly art, and a lot of blank papers dumped rather unceremoniously on my bed near the end of the competition.

The results of a trip to the grocer. I grabbed snacks, only a quarter of which I went though during the competition, and a cooked chicken.

The chicken and leftover rice from my fridge served as most of my meals during the competition. Plus apples.

What I drank during the competition, juice and chocolate milk. Sorry. Chocolate Dairy Beverage. I’m still not sure why it was labelled as such.

Now I need to get started on playing the other Ludum Dare entries and continue working on my game before I lose interest.

Why is there never enough time…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 9:19 pm and is filed under LD #16 - Exploration - 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.