A post-mortem for “A Villain By A Chance“.

What are my results:

• Coolness: I’m sorry I didn’t get a gold medal (how much games is it?).
• Innovation: A success! Yes! I got over 3! It means about 25% gave me 4! according to my criteria, it’s more that average! I’m so happy!
• Audio: It can mean 2 things: either I’m a great composer, or my other categories are fail. But I believe I could get a higher score. Let’s see… For the LD #23 I made a soundtrack for the game, each minigame, and finish screen, 4 total. This time I made only 1 piece and got a higher score. It means: quality over quantity! And I think if audio fits the mood, it’s an upside for audio as well.
• Humor: Doing nothing but receiving 1 more point is a success as well. Ridiculous.
• Theme: I dislike the theme. Other themes, like “Fortress”, “Chaos”, “Night and Day” allow very much possibilities. But when the theme is “You are the Villain” I can say a thing about almost every game: in it, you are the villain. I hoped to get a better score by making the protagonist not a villain yet, but it didn’t work. (In top games in “theme” category you are the villain. What a fail.)
• Mood: I don’t have many things to say about this one. But I can say one for sure: making a game with no mood and making a game with a little mood is equally difficult. Got it?
• Overall: A new high score here. It’s reassuring to see I get a higher score every LD.
• Graphics: Another example of quality over quantity. Instead of making a lot of images, like in LD #23, I made only the map and the goat.
• Fun: I knew that.

What went right:

• Innovation. I didn’t aim for it a lot, but I did it. *yeah*
• Polishing. I balanced the system, made some difficulties, a tutorial, level 2 feedback and other things.
• Balance. I spent about 1/4 time balancing, and it’s worth it.
• Time. To the end of the first day the game was fully playable. I had more time for balancing/polishing.
• Graphics. I used lighting for the pixelated map, and Inkscape for the goat.
• Drawing a goat. It’s an individual chapter for a post-mortem. I searched the web for a picture of a goat. I put it in MSPaint and drew a grid on top, then using grid copied it to paper, then to Inkscape. And it was my first image with Inkscape ever.

What went wrong:

• Fun. I knew I need to KISS (keep it simple and stupid), but I ignored this. But if I KISSed, I wouldn’t have got 3,22 innovation!
• User-friendliness. Most of my games are not user-friendly. They are more like user-fiendly. That’s my downside.

What I learned:

• You can abandon some things to get something well done.
• Getting 2 in mood (and humor) is a piece of cake.
• People like simple music with guitar chords.
• I’m lucky with games like this. Some one said “This is quite a complex thing to try and perfect in 48 hours!”, but I think it’s pure luck. Erm, I guess I’m mistaken, because it’s my second game like this.
• Consistency pwns. I’m sure it can be used to solve most problems, whether it’s making games, doing business or communicating with people.
• Quality is much better than quantity.

What will I try:

• To KISS.
• To make some other type of soundtrack. I know I can.
• To spend more time thinking over the idea. I can generate good ones, but I never did it for LD.

What do I suggest:

• Make “Coolness” like all other categories, so there is 1 gold, 1 silver and 1 bronze medals (by default). It’ll be super interesting.
• Make a self-calculating category based on all the categories. You know, this way you are cool when you get a high score in some category. I have 3,22 in innovation because I ignored the KISS rule, does it make this rule useless?

I made an instruction of what should you try hard to achieve a good rating in a certain category. I found out that for each category it’s either “Plan it” or “Come up with ideas”, so that’s the only thing you have to do. Do you know “Man in Gap”? A first game, yet a big success. So don’t be down if you are novice, you have a good chance to win.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2013 at 8:41 am and is filed under LD #25. 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.