I didn’t take the time to make a postmortem on the previous ludum dare, so I have to write it now, or I will forget again

The game : My entry is about kitten shooting stuff and eventually beating out the evolution theme because it take the spotlight as the main theme of the compo, and as we all know, kittens should be popular everywhere on the interweb !

What went right :

• Better time management : despite having less time than on the LD#23, I have been able to finish the game well before the deadline. The scale of the game was much smaller, but my knowledge of the creation pipeline also helped a lot. I also have been able to add a decent menu and end screen.
• Content creation : I spend way less time making sprite and animation this time. The result is not better than before, but at least I didn’t struggled as much.
• Code quality : I didn’t got much feedback for the moment, so I don’t know for sure that I haven’t some ugly bugs lurking in the shadows, but the final source code is cleaner and more bug free IHMO. I tried to keep things well separated, and it worked quite well.

What went wrong :

• Theme usage, I feel ashamed when I see what people made with the theme. I made the mistake to decide my game type before the annoucement of the theme, and wasn’t able to change direction after I realized that I can’t make the theme work well with what I have imagined
• The game again is too generic. there is not enough enemy type, or kittens action (like special attack and thing like that). I feel like I got the basic framework right, but I lacked time to implement the features that can make it stand out.
• The map feel too tiny, I feel like the game concept is wasted with the map size I used.
• Sound, I added some sfx this time, but having some music would have been way better.
• Graphics, but that doesn’t count, I’m a programmer I would like to improve in this area, but relying on ludum dare for that is not the best option since you take the habits to cut corners :p
• And using a laptop for a game which require level with scrolling I never missed my dual 21″ screen setup as much than this week-end.

Finally, here’s the link to see kittens in fierce battles : Kittens vs Evolution

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 at 1:54 pm and is filed under LD #24. 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.