Hi!

I will talk about Moche, a screen splitting game.

First, comments on my game made me pretty happy – insane is probably the most used word to describe the game, so I think I have accomplished what I wanted.

I have made a post-compo version of my game, which correct many problems. The time I spent on post-compo has been really usefull to understand my errors.

What went well

Engine

I have used Unity3D to make a 2D game. Using a 2D engine would have been really benefical for the performances, allowing a better optimisation than the use of multiple Cameras on Unity. However, I think I’m much quicker to create mini-games in Unity. So, even if it would have been much better to create the game with something else, I don’t regret using Unity for the ludum.

Sound

Well, for my first attempt doing sound, I must tell I’m pretty happy with the result. With some tips from friends, procedural music generation with MIDI sounds is quite easy and fast to do, and not so awful.

What was just OK

Bugs & Crashes

Well, I couldn’t fix all the bugs for the ludum. But a huge problem was the game crashing when you were splitting too much – depending of your computer. Many players have crashed the game while testing it, it’s a shame. I knew that, but decided not to spend time on this issue. However, I started investigating this for the post-compo version – I have really improved performance, and you should crash way latter now. This improvement took me 5 or 6 hours, so I think I’m pretty confident with the fact of not having it fixed for the ludum – I prefer a ludum version with more fun, even if it crashes.

What I did really wrong

Graphics

Ok, graphics are bad. Really bad. But I have the talent of a 4 year old child when it comes to drawing – and Moche means ugly in french, after all.So yeah, I would have liked better graphics – the game would deserved them – but I just can’t, sorry.

Comprehensibility

Here is the real problem : game is really hard to understand. You have to split the screen to improve your score – when you split, the two created screens perform different actions. First, there was no border between screens in the ludum version, which made it really hard. I’ve added this in, like, 10 minutes in the post-compo version, and it really adds much to the game. In the same way, the fighting game had absolutely no feedback – nobody understand what happens. Again, in 20 minutes I added feedbacks for the post-compo version. You also are given a bonus (invincibility for the runner, unsplit for the fighting game), but this is not explained, and really not understandable.

So, the real error done was : not having anyone testing my game before the end of the ludum. We were three people in my house, I was discussing with friends on IRC, I could have made them test the game to have clues about this. I will think about that for the next ludum.

Scoring

I think the scoring system is quite funny, but it had no leaderboard, so it wasn’t really usefull. It took an hour to add an online leaderboard for the post-compo version. I should have done that sooner.

Conclusion

Well, I’m pretty happy with this ludum, and definitely want to do the next one. Playing a lot of games is fun too.
Oh, and if you want to play, try the desktop version, I find it less crashing than the web version – and check the post-compo too !

Play

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2012 at 6:41 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.