Still need some sleep, but I least I have enough energy back to write this while things are clear in my head.

First, a big thanks to LudumDare organizers : thank you for making this event happen, I enjoy it every time. There’s so many games that were made, I’m not sure how many of them I will be able to play but I’m really looking forward to see what other people have come up with.

Now let’s talk about my own contribution : “Adventures in Noland”

The good parts

• At first, I was not sure to be able to dedicate enough time for the LD, but when I saw the them I liked it immediately and knew I had to make a game out of it. I’m happy that I could make it through and finish the game (just) in-time.
• I enjoyed  a lot making my tiny pixels graphics. I’m more like a coder and don’t do any gfx for daily work, so it was refreshing. And challenging. Trying to fit a dragon in a 7×7 pixel square is hard. I’m quite happy with the result and how quickly I could make it. I sure learned a lot and my next LD games will hopefully look better
• After some time lost looking for another game design, I’m very happy with the one I came up with. It feels really like a tiny world, yet it’s fun to explore.
• Doing the level design was great as well, I tried allowing several different ways to complete the game, hope we will see different ways of optimizing the final score

The hard parts

• I directly started (without warming up) and wrote a very quick GD : it was supposed to be a Civilization-like where IA cities would fight each others. After the world was displayed and NPC start moving around I didn’t feel anymore like doing that. From here, I took me almost a full day to find what I wanted to do.
• Time : Additionally to this day lost I was quite busy with home duties, both my wife and little girl being sick was hard to handle. I had to interrupt several times expect during the night. I guess I worked ~7 hours the first day and ~9 the second. Finished just in time for submit (which is 3am in France), didn’t have much time for polish.
• I would have like a few more hours to work a bit more on my gfxs, add a bit more hidden stuff in the world, do a title screen, add some sounds+music, and a proper font. That would have required maybe 4 more hours but I couldn’t afford them since I was always on the red line.

Play

Please play and rate my game here :  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=8497

I would also be happy if you can leave some comments on what you like or didn’t like

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2012 at 4:37 am and is filed under LD #23. 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.