Hi everyone! sev_inf (programmer, that did almost everything wrong) and KillToLive (artist, that did almost everything right) here and its time for our Super Darwin post-mortem.

First of all we would like to thank to everyone who played and rated game, your feedback was really great!

So, what went right:

• graphics –  a lot of people liked game art and the design of the game page;
• having a base code – allowed us to start creating the game as soon as we chosen the idea;
• idea – we pretty quickly decided what we’ll be building and a lot of people loved our version Charles Darwin story;
• features cutoff – initially we planed to do a lot more stuff, but when we realized that  we can’t get everything in time we dropped few of our ideas and spent the last day trying to make game to feel complete, and we think we did it right.
• game is beatable, despite its difficulty.

Things that went neither right, nor wrong:

• game engine – I’ve chosen cocos2d-html5 because I had previous experience with cocos2d-html5. In many ways this was right solution, but html5 version was in alpha stage during LD, so I spent few hours fighting wis game engine bugs;

And now, things that went wrong:

• don’t having a collisions code in my base code repository – I spend almost all first day implementing the collisions;
• jump physics – a lot of people complaint about it and we don’t like it either;
• combat – it is difficult to figure out cane attack range, in few places Darwin lacks ability to duck;
• enemy placement – lot of enemies are difficult or impossible to avoid;
• difficulty – previous two items combined  + lack of the continues or checkpoints.

We’ll definitely participate in future LD. Here are few tips for the next time:

• make a much easier game;
• probably, try different game engine;
• try to implement all game features during the first day and spend the rest of the time on level design and polishing;
• and don’t forget about AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2012 at 8:29 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.