This is my first time taking part in Ludum Dare or any other game competition or jam.  In fact, this is really the first time I’ve ever finished and published a game that anyone will actually play.  I work sporadically and much too carefully, every line of code is fretted over.  Also, prior to this game, I’ve never been able to draw my own assets but, knowing Ludum Dare was coming up, I learned Blender.  The time restrictions of Ludum Dare really keep moving you forward.  I’m not happy with the code, but I think the game itself came out quite good.

The storyline behind the game is a bit odd.  It’s probably the only submission about a murder/suicide.  A man pushes his wife out of a hot air balloon so he can be truly alone, only to face the wrath of karma.  He dies, and ends up in limbo where he will be alone for eternity.  The funny thing is, he likes it.  He’s finally at rest.  But there’s more to it than that.  He’s insane.  And not in an interesting and quirky way, in a “I painted a portrait of you with my feces, but I ate it before I had a chance to give it to you” kind of way.  There is no hot air balloon, he just pushes her out the window and runs into the street.  Those are not birds, they’re cars.  Those are not fighter planes and UFOs, they’re police.  Under it all, this is a pretty dark story about a man who murders his wife and commits suicide by cop.  But that’s depressing and hard to draw, so you get clouds and balloons.  I thought you’d enjoy that more.

 What was good

• Graphics with Blender.  I know a lot of you have an affinity for pixel art, but I just can’t draw pixel art well enough for my own standards.  Even my “Ludum Dare standards” are too high for my miserable pixel art.  Rendering the graphics with blender turned out really well.  The hot air balloon was fun to make and, while they were tedious to make and render, the clouds turned out really pretty.
• HTML5.  This is my first time putting something together with HTML5.  I was concerned it wouldn’t work on some browsers, or might be too slow (I’m using 640×480 sprites), but from the feedback I got it seems like HTML5 worked really well.  I’ll definitely use it again.  I used ImpactJS, but not in a way it was intended.  It worked the way I did it, but it was a little clunky.
• Story.  I began thinking about where on earth you could be so completely alone and went from there.  I think people will get a little chuckle when they first see the man’s wife plummet from the balloon in such a happy and serene scene.  And the ending was important, I’m glad I had time to get that in there.
• Tools.  I use Blender as I mentioned above, as well as The Gimp, bfxr, and the Sublime Text 2 editor.  All were great, except for The Gimp (see below).

What was bad

• My code.  I know I need to keep moving forward, but really, that code was bad.  I don’t think I can improve on it.  It is what it is and it stays that way forever.  This game is “done.”
• ImpactJS.  ImpactJS is great, but I used it in ways that it really wasn’t intended.  It was really clunky and I really should have went with something else for a game like this.  But I knew ImpactJS and didn’t want to take the time to learn another way of doing it.  It worked, and in other stuff I’ve started (but never finished), ImpactJS is great.  Don’t let this being in the bad column influence your opinion of it.
• The Gimp.  I’ve used The Gimp for a long time.  It’s a free and open source graphics program.  However, it doesn’t run well on Windows.  Its 3-window interface is and always has been an utter pain.  It was slow and generally bad.  I tried a pre-release version that had a single window interface which did improve the usability, but it was even slower and buggy.  I’m looking for a free/cheap alternative now.
• Music.  I have no idea how to compose music.  I tried an autotracker by GreaseMonkey.  It produced some interesting results, but nothing that I’d like to use in the game.  Next time I’d like to be able to compose music, so I’m going to learn how to use a tracker and about basic music composition.
• Sound.  I used bfxr.  It was OK, but I’m tired of this “sound chip from the 80′s” kind of sound.  I’ll have to find something better to do sound effects.
• Being sick.  I have pneumonia.  It sucks.  It did not help me in my game.

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.

Just some random thoughts about my entry, called Alone in the City:

(more…)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7062

What went right: 

• Built almost all of the features intended.
• Created something that is finishable and doesn’t crash.
• The ‘right’ amount of sleep.
• Had a hell of a lot of fun.

• Asset management.
• Time management.
• Overall workflow.

The first thing anyone of course notices is the lack of world GFX. This mainly falls under the time management category. I spent a good 2/3 of my total time writing the ‘engine’ and main character’s sprite leaving the remaining 1/3 to design the levels, add sound, and actually draw them pixels for the world content. T.T I really wanted to find a good chunk of 3 or 4 more hours to paint the world, tweak the mechanics, and tighten the level design. Asset management was also a big problem. My workflow was to draw art in photoshop, save out images as PNG’s, tab over to the flash IDE, import the images into the library, publish out a SWC and load it up in FDT. *_*; Can’t stress enough how much time was wasted clicking ‘save as’. It wasn’t until halfway through sunday that I started using photoshop actions etc. Too little too late.

The most fun:

• Writing the world map engine thing.
• Animatin’ dat main character and drawin dem pixels.
• Adding details ( wall slide / wall jump, clothing layers )

(all the assets used ingame, aside from the title screen) 

The not so much:  

• Collision engine
• Level design + testing.
• Asset management

(http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=2290)

First pot mortem ever haha, many things to say about this ludum dare! First of all, thanks to everyone for making out of this the best gaming competition ever, without any other people posting stuff all the time and chatting on the irc it wouldnt be the same, it keeps the motivation up in the sky even if you arent doing anything interesting, so thumbs up everyone for that!

Now with the game. At first, i had this idea of a racoon who is alone and must gather trash and food to survive on the city.. but the bloddy racoon kept looking like a cat! i hated him so i left him as a cat.
Then, i started writing the platforming engine based on the animations i just drew, i rewrited it afterwards but having that done quickly helped me a lot to start designing the entire game in very short time, so it was three hours after i started and i already had an idea, a style and an engine! yay! it was time to get into the theme.

After making the engine and the first levels i stopped for a while, i needed a story.. so, its a cat. and he is alone.. it naturally suggests the cat has been abandoned or something liked, and since i was rejective to the idea of abandonment (too sad for me hehe) i developed this “i forgot my cat on a road trip!” idea.. silly but it works!
So after having a bit of a placeholder intro i wrote a few more levels, added stuff, lives, texts and other stuff and took a long break before entering the last day.

Now on the last five hours i was determined to finish as much as i could, so i took the damn thing and started rewriting the platform collissions, added a menu (wich took me less than expected), sounds, finished the intro and mini tutorial, added one more level, GFX (rocks, water splash, orbs), fixed bugs and added a stats tracker. I actually ended up with enough time to make more stuff, but my ambitions where beyond the time i had left; I wanted to make a pretty Day/Night cycle to make things easier for me when making more levels, but after starting it i realized it was too much, so i submitted the game without it.

Rounding up;
What went right?

1. I completed a style i wanted to have on a game for a long time, kind of like a neo-retro thingy. i also managed to make a 2x scaling engine with surface in very short time, because i already had everything on m yhead from a start.
2. The platform engine turned up really well, despite the few bugs.
3. I managed to complete the intro in a way it actually explains what happened, at first it seemed as if you where abandoned and seemed crude.
4. I kept the game simple all along wich kept me on a very constant workflow during the whole time, also managed to  balace the ammount of sleep and work, unlike other times.
5. Had tons of fun!

What went wrong?

1. I couldnt finish the advanced day/night thingy (too much to do in so little time)
2. During the whole compo i couldnt think of a reliable ending so i left that aside for too long.
3. No timelapse! forgot to turn on chronolapse.. a pity because it would have been awesome!
4. I suck at platforms level design hehe, specially with puzzles and such.

Now its time to see the results of everyone’s work, Cheers and good luck!

There are many possible answers, even some impossible ones, but only one’s accurate.

I’m ridding myself of perfectionism.

Every time I start a project, I get stuck at worrying over every detail obsessively, to the point where the actual progress suffers. Ludum Dare with its strict time limit forces you to cut down on excess and only bring the meat to the table.

You can’t just wait for inspiration to strike out of nowhere. Inspiration comes when you’re actually doing and refining things. I was in a dead end in the night of day 1, but now I have a game I’m happy with. Perfectionism at its best is quality control for things you’ve already created, not a toll that blocks you from creating because “it won’t be good enough”. And LD always gets me in that sort of flow.

Also,

I told you it’s possible.

The developers on my team said they wanted to make our project (MAD) next year, so I’m free now…

If someone needs, I can draw some maps or another kind of graphics… Oh, but I don’t speak english very well :/
Some examples of my work:
http://gabrielforan.deviantart.com/

http://imgur.com/a/f3i5A#0

Here’s the timelapse for my entry: Accident

Now that I have gotten some sleep I’ll go ahead and reflect about how I think I did on my game. I’ll be honest that I wasn’t a huge fan of the alone theme and I didn’t really have any ideas initially. Me and my wife brainstormed together for a while after it was announced, but we couldn’t come up with anything that I was satisfied with. I eventually decided to make a platformer and that I could come up with the exact storyline later. This worked well because as I worked on the platformer code I also spent some time working on the art. While working with the art I managed to come up with a simple storyline that I felt was a good fit for the ‘alone’ theme.

What went right

• Graphics – I really like the look of my game. I had decided prior to the start that I was going to use a very minimal palette and it fit my game very well. I also added a fading effect to the screen that added to the alone factor. Overall, I think the graphics were pretty good.
• Audio – I made a simple short background track that sounds alright. I’m not very good at making music, so getting anything that sounds halfway decent is in a win in my book.
• Editor – I have created a nice tile editor from previous projects that I used to create the game world. It was fairly easy to use and all I had to do was write the code to import the binary map files.
• Storyline – I like the story of my game. I don’t want to give any details, but I like the flow that it has.
• Tools – I was very familiar with the tools that I used. Gimp, PxTone, Visual Studio, C# and XNA. They are all things that I have been using for at least several years.

What went wrong:

• Editor – There are a couple things about the editor that made it tedious to work with. It has auto tiling functionality, but the tileset has to be setup a certain way for it to work and I couldn’t do it with the tileset I was using. It also didn’t do any scaling on the Source texture and because I was using 8×8 tiles, it was a little difficult to select the tile you wanted.
• Time Management – I spent way too much time playing my game. I had more elaborate plans for the storyline, but due to time constraints, I wasn’t able to implement them. You can actually see hints of it in the world if you look closely enough.

Overall, this Ludum Dare was a great experience and I think my game is significantly better than my LD21 entry. I encourage everyone to give it a try and tell me what you think. Here is the link to the entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=4628

Right well everyone else is doing post mortems I suppose I should too!

Seriously though it’s nice being able to look over what happened, so here we go,

The Good:

• I started with a simple idea that took 10 minutes to plan out which didn’t get me bogged down at the start so I had far more time to actually work on the game. Infact the large majority of the game was design and planned during the course of the 2 days.
• I was very familiar with all the tools I used and so there wasn’t an awful lot that slowed me down.
• I am very happy with the graphics of my game as I was worried before the competition what to do about textures but I ended up being creative and made my own in Paint.NET
• I took frequent breaks from my computer which made me feel less tired of staring at a computer screen and I felt made me more productive.

The Bad:

• I feel I got the balance wrong and the game was too difficult.
• As stated in my journal entries I had a lot of trouble with sound design and music as this is not my strong area(practice needed)
• I am not a hundered percent happy with the gameplay in the first part of the game, I feel it was too slow and unexciting which may put people off playing through to the later stages of the game

Overall though I am extremely happy with what I did in my first LD and I will undoubtedly be back for more next time! My game can be found and rated here. And my timelapse of 27 hours can be watched right here.

ive updated the zip with some libs that meant some ppl couldnt run it.. it should work for every1 now

cheers

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8824

bINAry_giRL

You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSZJI-Q0t5Y

Abandoned Planet – Timelapse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hBpw8uwTe4&list=UU1XS3HgzgDvk1DZ1KUO1j7w&index=1&feature=plcp

Enjoy!

Whew. I’m experiencing a ludum dare hang over right now. I’m not pleased of the state of my game that I submitted. Too many bugs and too many glitches. But I had lots and lots of fun! And I made an RPG in 48 hours!

To the game!

Artwork

This is my third LD and I’m starting to get quite fast at pixeling sprites and tiles. I imposed the limitation of 4(+white) grey shades, a sprite size of 16×16 pixels and a window size of 160×144 upon myself for this Ludum Dare. The first artwork only took a couple of hours to make. The problems came when I had to do the details. I remember that I spend more than an hour on the sprite of the main character. Almost half an hour on the positioning of the hair. Overall I spend most of the time creating artwork and not coding, which is a good thing.

Tiles

Tiled Map Editor and the AdvancedTiledMapLoader for Love were a huge help. I didn’t have to code a complete tile engine and could use such things as the properties of tiles for map connection and teleportation. This way creating maps was a fun and not so much a time consuming process.

Code

All went well until I began with the “hero” class. I used humps classes for Löve which are great but my design of the class was very flawed. I should have implemented some kind of state machine for the behaviors of the character but now the classcode is littered with checkflags and “isBlabla” variables. This might be the first thing I’ll change if I get back to this project. I almost had to rewrite the whole thing, because of the movement bugs that I just couldn’t get under control, but there wasn’t enough time. I normally write my code in iterations: plan the class – try out this planned version – clean up – try out a refactored way – rinse and repeat until it does what it should and is still readable. This approach might not be very good for a ludum dare because it consumes too much time. I should stay away from lazy lazy instantiation and use strict.lua and write tests in the future to get my nilled objects errors under control.

The biggest problem was writing and designing the combat system. Originally I planned to make a half-action-timed battle system a la chrono trigger. The problem lay in the implementation. This is asked way to much to develop in 2 days and so in the end rush I kicked out a lot of the roundbased rules and only left in the “action points”(AP). To execute an attack you will use a certain number of AP. You can hot-trigger attacks via the C-V-B keys and open the menu via the X key. Since I originally planned to make the combat semi-automatic the standard sword attack involved moving character to the current enemy and back. This is were most of the bugs in the compo version happen. Sometimes the distance is miscalculated or references to the current enemy are lost and so the automatic movement goes berzerk. Again, If my code had been better structured I would have found the errors on time.

Conclusion

For inspiration I listened to a lot of music from Final Fantasy Adventure and I think you can hear this when you listen to my soundtrack. The creative side did go well this time. I had lots of ideas but not enough time to make everything happen. My programming performance on the other hand was very bad and I’m almost ashamed of the code that I put out there. But still I’m pleased that I made a (mostly) working RPG in 2 days. If you are interested I can keep you posted on future versions of this because I plan to work on this over the holidays(maybe even begin an iOS version?).

I upload my time-lapse to youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6PFbbDYhb0&feature=plcp&context=C38ad134UDOEgsToPDskIHl9HcocC3AmoFil_Y2k1g …but the problem is that it has distortion and is very “pixelead” and i upload several videos with the same result… any ideas? i used chronolapse to record this!

Timelapse:

(Around one hour of work was missed out as I forgot to record the timelapse at that point.)

Postmortem:

To start off with, I was having one or two issues with coming up with a suitable response to the theme. I resolved this by going for a lonely survival style game.
I had a few problems with Flash’s absolute and relative x any y positions in sub-objects – but I managed to solve this in about an hour.
I finished the game quite early, I would have added more, but I was too tired.
I think that I did reasonably well for a first attempt, and I am going to be judging 2-3 entries a day.
It has been good fun making this game, and I would consider entering Ludum Dare next year.

Best aspects: Overcoming some problems quite quickly and making use of filters to improve graphical style.
Biggest problem: Keeping code optimised – the code is VERY messy, and the game is nowhere near to how efficient it should  be.

Entry:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7499

Just in case you haven’t figured this out already:

If you want to see the journal for a game’s author from the entry’s page, it isn’t working atm. A quick workaround (after clicking the link) is to copy or write the author’s name after a “=” just at the end of the adress bar of your browser. This would look like this:

Before:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/category/ld-22/?author_name

After:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/category/ld-22/?author_name=tcstyle

I’m doing this a lot actually to make my mind about the community rating for games I rate. So go rate many of all these wonderful games!

Well, Finally got the video all rendered up! I hope you enjoy it. I certainly enjoyed the 29 hours of it! ;’D

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=6638

Tools: Photoshop / Construct 2 / kuler.adobe.com / cfxr / GarageBand

Description:

Va Unan is a 3rd person from top view game, where you arrive to a strange place and must activate glyphs to open doors and escape from this place.

 What went Right: 

>>  Timing. I never felt any lack of time and my progress was constant.

>>  Workflow. I started with designs on paper (filling 4 categories: MECHANICS, AESTHETICS, TECHNOLOGY and STORY). Then I made some art and put it into Construct 2 to make the base mechanics and the gameplay. I went back to Photoshop and made all the artwork and sounds with cfxr. I made a playable version back to C2 and voila!

>>  Early prototyping. Even if I was unsure of the final game idea I had main mechanics playable in a few hours.

>>  Work on two computer. It was a comfort to be able to use Photoshop and other creation tools on my Mac and assemble/compile on my PC (laptop). The key is a Ethernet cable!

What went wrong:

>> My laptop broke. The 2nd day, my laptop did not turn on anymore. I decided to remove the hard drive and continue on my Windows partition on my mac, but one of the 4 screws holding my HD was broken so I drilled the broken screw and continued as projected, switching from windows to mac by restarting my computer. About 3h were spent in that.

 >>  Unknown tools. I learnt Construct 2 during the comp.

 >>  Unprepared. I decided to participate a few hours before the theme announcement, so I wasn’t prepared at all.

 >>  Strange theme. The theme was a bit too large. I would have preferred a theme that forces me to think about game mechanics more. “Alone” made me do an atmospheric game.

Time log: http://corentin.derbre.free.fr/log.txt

Youtube video: Video! (no sound and image compression errors, it’s just so see the gameplay)

Soundtrack

Ok so I crashed for some sleep after submitting my compo entry and I figure now is the best time to do  a postmortem.

In traditional game projects people usually go off on vacation or put off post mortems long enough to forget about the details

The ‘Game’

Forever Alone Kitten

Play / Rate it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=3624

 Made with: Unity3d / Photoshop / BFXR / Maya

Points of frustration

1. Indecision about Dialogue/Story, after the theme was announced I was at a loss for what to do. So I went through the motions of creating the game engine shell while being nagged by this. I originally wanted to make a shmup, but tried to do something moody to fit with the ‘Alone’ theme and sort of flailed around for several hours trying to define it.
2. I’m still new at learning unity and wanted my entry to be made with it, so consulting the documentation repeatedly or trying to figure out proper script code to control material properties or other things slowed me down bit.
3. No time for visual polish/build a proper environment. At the end I lied to myself and said its supposed to look bleak and empty anyways.
4. No game restart. I realized early that worrying about adding/testing restart functionality would have slowed me down considerably, so I abandoned it even though there is some fragments of it in the game.
5. Based on the player input, its possible to not see all the game narration paths, so if someone plays it only once, there is stuff I put time into that they may not see and the length or mood impact can vary. The lack of #4 (restart), or communicating that there is ‘another path’ in the game content is also problematic. This is why I don’t like permanent branching games as a game player, and prefer ‘networked world’/sandbox games because all content is explorable at anytime or multiple times. I’m not convinced story heavy games really hold up to replayability since they all seem to suck at this issue (you played this before, but this menu option here will show you something different, a hint like that would be kind of spoilerish or break immersion).

Things I was happy with

1. I learned a lot. I’m a ‘learn by doing’ type of person, so forcing myself to deliver something in 48hrs made from scratch in the time limit = learn + do fast. I used version control even for this short-term project so i could document its construction in the commit messages and  would stop worrying about ‘accidents’ where i would lose work or mangle things so badly and could rollback.
2. Some people commented on liking the mood in the game, which is what I decided to focus most on. Someone despaired that when they played there seemed to be no “happy ending”. My goal of toying with the player’s emotion = ‘mission accomplished!’
3. I came up with a neat little forcefield behavior around character that affects the things that swarm and come for you, the enemies still face+approach you, but when the shield is up it holds them back and they get pushed around fairly smoothly when you forcibly move into them. I’ll have to re-use that for another project….
4. Although the code is absolute spaghetti, there is alot of it with some lengthy comments sprinkled in it so I could remember what I was doing along the way, so its not a complete throw-away game shell for something in the future. For the curious: Link to source/assets/unity project are here:  http://db.tt/eJOJT6Dx

In reference to point #4 above, I call my rapid code prototyping style ‘Freestyle Spaghetti / Chaos Coding’. People that care about ‘coding style’ or ‘designing clean systems’ will be outright offended by what they see here haha

The basic rules of ‘Freestyle Spaghetti / Chaos Coding for rapid prototypes+game jams:

1. Extra Comments, you need them. You need more comments than you think you do. I write comments as a way of ‘talking out loud’ about what i’m doing. It makes things more clear, and when I come back to the code later, I can more easily remember where I left off.
2. Extra Verbose variable/object names. you want every variable name to make it painly obvious as to what its scope and contents are. Between #1 + # 2, I rarely ever need to step through code using a debugger because I can work out what is going on following these 2  rules.
3. New ideas may often come to you while writing code for other things, jumping to act on that new idea is okay, as long as everything still runs you’re cool. Unfinished things = comment verbosely what is going on. Before you jump to the new thing, always write a note in code about what you were just doing+need to do next there, then jump to the new thing while the idea is fresh to you.
4. Everything can look to a base (GameBase.cs) to figure out what is going on (access a global value state) to gate/ungate a script that doesnt work or isnt complete.
5. Take the path of least resistance in implementation. Data driven? Code Driven? Do I need a tool? Do I need a file format? Could you just hack it in code and be done with it?
6. The person playing your game doesn’t see your code when they play it. Stop worrying about what your code looks like and focus on the results that people will play. You can pretty up your code and ‘refactor it’ later if you need to build on it.

Things that took more time than I expected:

1. Audio – I spent a lot of time with bfxr trying to get sounds out of it that matched the mood I wanted (trying to get a sad kitten+spooky type sounds out of a synth). There’s a lot of extra sounds in the source that I didnt use which fit the mood target but i didn’t get to implement due to the time limit+needing more supporting graphics+code to go with them.
2. Art/Tweaks – I went crazy with the particles. I liked the square/fine grain look of the particles so i kept the particles untextured to save time. I fussed with the colors of everything several times to keep it the right ‘mood’ as well as all the other particle effect sliders. I lost time modeling a few other things that didnt make it into the game and realized that there wasn’t going to be enough time to texture+rig+animate them so I trashed that given the time pressure.
3. Dialogue/Narration – changed multiple times after playtesting through it over and over and over…. Having a premade system to handle complex dialogue/interaction would have been much better. hacking something from scratch+testing it with time pressure was painful.
4. Setting up+modifying my game in unity. To save time I did some things in the unity editor instead of explicit code, which i’m still getting the hang of. The editor workflow method has little quirks like nuking connections or values on scripts if you change the variable name in the class to something new ended up biting me several times, breaking the game. Trying to find a balance of initializing/setting script values hardcoded or in the editor view on an instance of something with a given script slowed me down and I should have more clearly defined this.

Things to do next time:

1. Setup and do a timelapse next time. In retrospect i’m even more sad I didnt do this. Ideally I would do record this for 3 screens since I work across 2 screens on my mac (playtest+code+ photoshop on cintiq), + geo modeling pc.
2. Do something that doesn’t waste so much time with unique dialogue flow with one-off internal triggers/unlocks that the player might not ever trigger.
3. Continue to write code fast+freely for the sake of progress, and don’t be so worried about what people think of your code that you hacked together over the weekend. (I write much better code for normal games I swear! )
4. Build out a more of traditional game to play?
5. Worry less about story/playtesting dialogue flow. Focusing the first half of the compo time on this was good/bad since it ate up a ton of time – it was uncharted territory for me in terms of content+code implementation.
6. Better schedule my time and set time limits on doing a feature/asset.
7. Start visual polish phase and test deployment earlier so there is less of a frantic rush at the end.