Guess I’ve procrastinated long enough, here are my thoughts on my LD#22 entry Moving Day.

Statistics

These are probably pretty typical stats for games that don’t generate much buzz during the rating period.  I tracked my clicks using bit.ly and so far the source code has only been downloaded 6 times, total game clicks of 111 and total timelapse views of 144.

I also posted a link to facebook late at night, but that link saw very little traffic. I’m guessing it got buried in the flood of posts and most people saw it in the morning when they couldn’t play a flash game. I don’t think my social network made much of an impact on the statistics… it would be better to post such things just as work is letting out in your target location. The demographics were also interesting, you can see how this is really a global community:

What went right

• I’m pretty pleased with my tool selections. FlashDevelop + Flixel has been fun to learn and I was able to come up to speed fairly quickly.
• Inkscape saved the day for graphics as I quickly realized that I lacked the skills to make decent animated frames with pixel art. I’m pretty satisfied with my run animations.
• Recording a timelapse was actually pretty helpful for me. When you  get into the zone it is easy to lose track of time, the timelapse helped show me that the time I spent browsing was really pretty trivial when compared to the time I spent prematurely tweaking gameplay.

What went wrong

• I spent too much time tweaking gameplay before implementing randomized game levels. I usually get stuck obsessing over gameplay in my other prototypes and I’m glad that Ludum Dare forced me to go beyond that but I still wasted way too much time here.
• The innovative part of my game was supposed to be a physics-based gliding system that let you trade speed for jump height. I spent many hours tweaking these equations with a static game level and that work was basically wasted once I replaced the static level with randomized one.
• Animating the death scene was also pretty tedious. I should have learned how to use a tweening engine before the compo.
• Last minute bugs. I ran into a randomized null pointer error in the last hour of development… which was solved with a comically stupid hack: while(x==null) x = randomobject();

Next time around I’ll make sure to implement basic gameplay, levels and a win/loss condition before spending time tweaking any specific parts.

Tags: LD22, postmortem

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2012 at 6:18 pm and is filed under LD #22. 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.