It’s my first time LD48, I learned a lot and here is my post mortem.

It’s the second video game project I managed to finish. The first one, made during my studies, was a simple beat em all involving rabbits, birds and fish… In a group of two people, we ended up with a game visually nice but not fun at all. I had this only experience, but learned lots of things.
This time, I’m alone and I didn’t want to make the same mistakes (ie. focus on graphics and content, and not on gameplay) and make something more dynamic… Verdict ?

Play the game here

What went right (ie. the preparation…)
- Tools
I used Unity3D to make this game because I was the most familiar with, even though I wanted to make a 2D game. It was the simpliest way for me to make a game in time without learning a whole new language. Hours before the beginning, I had to familiarize with Orthello 2D, a free Unity framework to handle 2D, which helped me to gain some time.
- Drawing
Whatever the theme was, I knew I wanted to do a 2D game with nice hand drawn art (actually, I hate drawing pixel art, it’s so small..). Drawing takes a lot of time, I was aware of this fact, so I had to manage time carefully and create a limited number of resources with a simple art style. I looked for something to create sprite sheets, sprite fonts…

What went wrong (ie. development phase…)
- Balance
I didn’t have to check the balance of the game : enemies attack rate, enemies respawn time, player movements… Even though the game is playable, some variables are so random that winning or loosing can be a question of chance.
- Time
Since it’s my first time participating, I planned something too big for only 48h. Sunday night, I knew i couldn’t finish in time, so I gave up the compo and turned to the jam. It gave me an extra 24h, but it was still not enough, and I finished with an untested, unbalanced and unpolished game.
- Drawing
I actually spent too much time on drawing useless features like night/day, parallaxing background (these 2 are not even in sync, you can have a sun during the night)… Evolution related, I had to draw different different looks for my character and an animation for each one. Once again, I focused too much on graphics and not on gameplay.
- Theme
I really expected 1000 kittens

 
I plan to polish and complete it so feedback are appreciated
 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2012 at 11:34 am 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.