With the rating period winding down, it's time to me to reflect on how I did. This was my second Ludum Dare, and there are definitely areas where I've improved since the first one. Getting on the frontpage of Newgrounds was one heck of an achievement, and always something I'll be proud of. Once again, a massive thank you to everyone who played AsterVoid, and left such good ratings and feedback. I really appreciate it.

Having said that, there are also areas where I feel I did worse this time. So...

What Went Well

• When Love Is A Battlefield came out, it was so glitchy that I had to rush out a patch to fix the more serious issues. However, since AsterVoid was simpler and smaller in scope, I was able to test it more thoroughly, and I feel like it's a lot more polished. I even had time to throw in content and Easter eggs beyond what I'd originally planned.
• Thanks to the earlier start time, I was able to stay up to see what the theme would be, brainstorm for a bit, then go to bed and wake up nice and prompt on Saturday. Thanks to that, I got at least a couple of hours' extra dev time compared to LD41.
• Now that I have some experience with PICO-8, I find developing on it a lot easier. Similar to my point about testing, I was able to spend far less time on things like menus than I did with LIAB, giving me more time to play with things like the reusable particle system and the eight-digit scoring system (which, in hindsight, was probably unnecessary).
• The sound effects don't suck!

What Went Badly

• While AsterVoid's smaller scope helped me get it done and polished with less hassle, I feel like it also detracted from the end product. For all its glitches and balance issues, Love Is A Battlefield was a true 8-bit bullet hell game with a deep, meaningful storyline, and a love interest who reacts to your performance. AsterVoid is just a gussied-up Asteroids clone. I don't think my Innovation rating is going to look too good this year.
• On top of that, I don't think I did enough to integrate the "void" mechanic into the actual gameplay. As several reviewers have noted (and as my own gameplay GIFs show) you can just stay in the middle of the screen racking up points, and the voids will never be an issue. I thought about ways to prevent this - spaceships that shoot at you, have the player be moving when they spawn, make voids block your bullets - but they all would have made the game even more difficult than it already is.
• Collision detection. The bane of my PICO-8 programming experience. This game could seriously have benefitted from per-pixel collision detection, but I just... didn't know how to do that. I had a look at other people's algorithms but couldn't make sense of them, and I couldn't use them anyway because Compo. So instead, AsterVoid has clunky square hitboxes that make the game even harder.
• I still have no idea how to use PICO-8's music editor.

What Comes Next?

I'm still committed to releasing an updated "DX" version of Love Is A Battlefield. I may also make a couple of post-jam updates to AsterVoid, just to address a few of the issues that people have raised, but I don't think there'll be any significant overhauls to it like there will be with LIAB.

For now, I gotta play some more games, as I've been busy for most of the rating period and haven't had the chance. Once again, thanks to everyone who's played my game so far! You're all helping me learn, and I promise my next game will be better (and not another top-down space shooter :P )

~F1