“Subconsciously Alone” Post Mortem
My game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=5063
Got some sleep so that now my mind is clear. This is my post mortem:
What went right
First LD48. This was my first time, and I enjoyed myself. I’ll definitely be in LD23, and maybe the next MiniLD. It’s a great concept as you get pushed to create a game within every short time, so you’ll be forced to come up with a product – and hopefully in most cases it’ll be good.
Coming up with the concept. At first I wasn’t that excited about the whole “Alone” theme, but then I came up with an idea and worked from that point on. The whole ‘everything is going on inside the protagonists’ head’ concept came out pretty well, especially with the description of how the protagonist can create things, because he is inside his own dreams.
Gameplay. The whole mechanism works quite well, and there’s not really many bugs with it, except for maybe the items collision with the level, sometimes it reacts a little weird if approached from some angles. I liked the pushing gifts around feature a lot, and the enemies (Guardians) also came out pretty well – even though they’re pretty simple, their swarming works quite well.
Graphics. I may not be a professional artist, but I think the graphics and the art style came out pretty well. I tried to make it seem sort of… inside his the protagonist’s head with the different purple background.
What went wrong
Difficulty. The game came out quite difficult, and I didn’t really have time to balance it. Programming the enemies and the survival system was pretty much in the last 6 hours of development, and I needed everything to work, so I was focusing more on getting things done, than getting things balanced.
Audio. I had made a song for the game, but it didn’t come out so good, so I decided on not having it in the final game. I didn’t make any sound effects either, so I couldn’t get the exact mood I wanted in the game, but I hope the intro movie and introduction part of the level makes up for that…
Design mistakes. One of the gameplay features is that you can draw a box, press space and that box becomes a part of the ground for some time. You can also drop gifts with space, when you are NOT drawing a box. To damage the Guardians, you need to drop a gift, open it by drawing a box over it, and then kicking the gift into the Guardian to kill it – this process is quite hard to manage, as it all revolves around the space-key and the mouse, which is very difficult to manage, unless you’ve got a really good mouse.
All in all. I forgive myself for my mistakes as this is my first LD48, but I guess next time speed coding I’ll be planning things a little bit more, before just going on coding and designing. I’ve had a fun time, and I hope everyone else had a good time, and isn’t too stressed out…as I feel. 