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Speed to Freedom Post Mortem
Posted by helloserve (twitter: @helloserve)
December 19th, 2011 5:59 am
Well, halfway through Monday and I’m still awake. That has to be some sort of accomplishment, right?
Anyway, I’m really proud of my first ever entry to Ludum Dare. It turned out 95% from what I had in mind. I had actually thought about the tunnel racer idea and setting a week prior already, and figured it’s something that scopes well into a 48h limit. And then the theme – although pretty bland, I could fit it right into my story…
Post mortem specifically:
Good Bits
- I used my very familiar tools for art and development. So mostly things went very smoothly with only one or two re-dos or revisions on assets.
- I used some of the XNA 4.0 features which I’ve never touched before, like the default XML pipeline. It worked out brilliantly and I didn’t need to write an editor or content combiners.
- Having had the setting (mood, visual style etc) in my head for a week prior meant no time spent on paper or concept prototyping.
- In-person meet up and dev sessions with the rest of the Cape Town dev community proved to be a lot of fun.
Bad Bits
- I initially used geometery generation for the tunnel itself (excluding obstacles) and initial implementation wasted a lot of time due to a bug in the VertexBuffer data calls. Debugging that was a whole morning. Eventually I ditched it and went for a static pre modeled solution with UV coordinate updates which took like 5 minutes to implement… Doh!
- Sound. Just… sound..
- Lack of play testing – I had to make a change to the random generator after initial submission. It generated impossible situations too often.
- Speed-painting the title/background and story screens. I suck at speed painting, but it had to be done.
Overall I had a blast and will join the next one without doubt.
Link to download the game is here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8138