Robo[R]Evolution was a very exciting game to make, despite things getting very stressful before the end of the 72 hours. Overall however I had a ton of fun working on my first Jam game. If you haven’t played it yet, give it a try! People really seem to like what we’ve made.

 WHAT WENT RIGHT

• Pretty graphics- Skyler spent a lot of time making TELEBOT look cool and spiced things up with a lot of vibrant color and animation.
• Music- Besides working on art, Skyler also put a decent amount of time into making the game’s 10+ minutes of music really add life to the game.
• Theme interpretation- A lot of people chose to make robot-themed games based on the Evolution concept but we got our earliest ideas nearly 15 minutes into the competition, so there wasn’t much time wasted on coming up with stuff to do.
• Story- Joe’s writing was fantastic and definitely added to the general feel/mood of things each time TELEBOT evolved.

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Time Management- It was hard to get things done in a timely fashion. Nate got sick on the 2nd day and needed extra rest, and without any direction Skyler got a bit distracted for a few hours.
• Bugs- Despite the extra 24 hours, Nate had some serious issues programming some key features before time ran out, leading to corner cutting. Luckily he had just enough time to throw a hotfix out before the submission hour ended!
• Balance- First the game was WAY too easy- then the hotfix made it WAY too hard. The post-jam version fixed some things but there is still work to be done.
• Pacing- At first, the game was going to be 100 waves long, but it ended up taking almost an hour just to get to the first story advancing sequence at wave 20! So that was quickly fixed before the first release.

Tags: Ludum Dare, Ludum Dare 24, post-mortem

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2012 at 8:34 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.