As promised, a timelapse and graphical analysis of my LD48 project, minigames octacade. Let me first explain something about the workflow used here.  I batched several activities in order to save time.  Before even knowing what games I was going to develop, I created 70 random sprites, and 15 tiles and backgrounds.  After that I developed the games one by one.  For each game I selected graphics using a “graphical selector” that shows different combinations of sprites, tiles, and backgrounds.  After the games were finished, I created all sounds for all games, as well as explosions and particle effects, in a single session.

The batch activities are called “general activities” in the graphs below.  Other general activities are programming that is not related to a specific game, deployment (uploading, creating LD entry, creating screenshots), and “other” (not classified).

Some graphics were created during game development as needed, these are classified under the particular game that the graphics were created for.  This accounts for about 1-2 hours of development total.

Some conclusions:  I created too few tiles at the start, given how little time it takes to do it batch-wise.  More colour schemes to choose from would have been useful.  The backgrounds are the most time-consuming, not shown under “backgrounds” are about 30 minutes of creating backgrounds during game-specific development.  A more automated process for making them tileable etc. would have been useful.  Sound also took more time than I expected. I spent a lot of time unsuccessfully mutating sounds in sfxr.  Actually adding the sounds in the code took hardly more than 2 minutes per game. Surprising is that deployment actually took significant time, so this could be further optimised too.

About equal amounts of time were spent on each specific game.  An interesting fact is that the game I spent the least time on (Axis Invaders) was actually the most popular with the reviewers, and the game I spent the most time on (Digger) is my own least favorite. Story of my life… this is what inspired me to do this project in the first place.  In the wild, some of my simplest and even roughest games seem to be appreciated the most.  Once I find out which games people like most, I can concentrate on further polishing these games.

And here is the timelapse which the analysis was performed on:

And, before I forget, you can play the games here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=14520

Participants of Ludum Dare 22 were asked to fill out a survey on their experience. A whopping 747 people filled out the survey.

Thanks for taking the time to fill it out!

I love this enthusiastic and supportive community.

Here are the results (click to zoom).

(more…)