Well, I have to say that compared to my last Ludum Dare, this experience was COMPLETELY different. The first difference that comes to mind is how I didn’t waste all of my time trying to create a physics/movement engine. That thing sucked up, probably, about 80% of my time and I certainly wouldn’t call it “complete” even now. Also, it was more laid back since I only got around 14 hours to work on the game, as opposed to the 24 – 30 that I had last time.

What Went Well:

• I, once again, was focused the entire time. I was so focussed, in fact, that I forgot to finish off a delicious beverage (although don’t worry – I drank it now).
• My game concept was simple enough to leave me a whole day to work on assets & the front end.
• Audio. It existed this time. I think it sounds pretty nice for, like, 30 seconds on a loop.
• I had lots of screenshots & some demos to share before the compo ended (although I don’t think I packaged the demos correctly, and the LD site was down)

What Didn’t Go So Well:

• Uploading. I wasn’t good at it. I gotta remember to include sndfile.framework & to add other frameworks to the “Copy Frameworks” step in Xcode. I actually lost $5 here because I bet my brother that I uploaded something correctly and it didn’t work.
• I didn’t test all the “pipelines” involved in my game; 1 hour before the contest ended, I realized that I didn’t know how to get audio into my game. I figured it out though.
• All my ideas at the start were basically the same; I was only considering ideas where you (singular) were trying to escape from something, which isn’t really thinking outside of the box. I was actually really displeased with all of my ideas, and wasn’t having much fun developing them until I thought of the evacuation idea.

Overall, I am once again pleased with the product that I produced, and think that it is a pretty big step above my last entry, and am looking forwards to December. I might keep working on my entry (after the ratings though; programmers = good playtesters) since I can think of a few ways to spice it up.

(If you are some sort of STRANGE ALIEN and have yet to play my game, it’s over here)

Tags: postmortem

This entry was posted on Monday, August 22nd, 2011 at 3:08 pm and is filed under LD #21. 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.