girl2501 / play+rate / braingale

this was my third time participating in ludum dare; when the theme was announced I absolutely hated it.  I was ready to sit this one out and spend the weekend loathing myself, but ended up joining forces with John Sandoval, PostPre, and Jack Sanders to make this.

what went well:

• teamwork — I usually prefer to work by myself or with a musician, for many reasons. my experiences collaborating with people have been largely negative up to this point: my priorities in game design seem to differ quite a lot from most others, and it can make me a very difficult person to work with. the decision to team up was made on a whim, and I had no idea whether it was going to be a disaster or not. it was a lot more fun to work with john and jack than I expected (I’ve been working with postpre for about 6 months now, on this, so I knew what to expect from him);  I’m pretty sure there was more than one occasion where jack sanders wanted to punch me in the face, but overall it was a good experience with lots of laughs and good vibes. definitely want to work with one of them again in the future.
• art — the visuals for this turned out really well, I think. most of the credit goes to John, of course —I just did the environment art and UI design.
• sound — PostPre basically fucking killed it.  the music is great, and the creepy intercom voice-overs are a defining point of the game.

what went shit:

• time management — there were a lot of corners we had to cut that, in my opinion, kept this game from being something really special. I believe that a big reason for that is how much we dicked around with things that probably weren’t very important. for example, I spent two hours making this and showing it to the rest of the braingale gang. that was a bad idea. I also feel like we spent a lot more time on art assets than we should have — we really should have focused more on quantity than quality.
• gameplay — this game had a really solid idea behind it, but conflicting interests and early programming difficulties really hindered us from fully fleshing out the concept. the gameplay isn’t anywhere near as dynamic or interesting as it could be, and is blemished by janky movement and collision boxes.

click here to play and rate

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2012 at 3:34 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.