{"author_link":"\/users\/sergi-montaner","author_name":"Sergi Montaner","author_uid":"sergi-montaner","comments":[],"epoch":1556746346,"event":"LD44","format":"md","ldjam_node_id":155768,"likes":4,"metadata":{"p_key":"131845","p_author":"Sergi Montaner","p_authorkey":"1122425","p_urlkey":"348039","p_title":"They Ran Out of Mana postmortem","p_cat":"LDJam ","p_event":"LD44","p_time":"1556746346","p_likes":"4","p_comments":"0","p_status":"WAYBACK","us_key":"1122425","us_name":"Sergi Montaner","us_username":"sergi-montaner","event_start":"1556236800","event_key":"75","event_name":"LD 44"},"node":{"_collation":{"body_sanitizer":"TextUtils::SanitizeHTML via existing importer","event":"LD44","removed_author":false},"_superparent":139254,"_trust":1,"author":122425,"body":"Hi after finishing the jam and updating a couple of fixes, we can now share out experience. So here is our postmortem.\n\nIf you want to know what I'm writting about, here is our game.\n\nhttps:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/44\/they-ran-out-of-mana\n\n**What went right:**\n\n**1** - Game design freeze before the jam. \n\nWhen Pau and I decided to join the jam some months ago we agreed that doing a card game would be fun. \n\n![progress_2.gif](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/24385.gif)\n*Cards everywhere!*\n\nA few weeks ago I came our with an abstract game mechanic. The idea was to put a theme on it based on the winning one. \nThe initial design was more complex of what we ended up doing, but gave us a lot of focus and saved us valuable time. When the final round of themes was announced we imagined, for all of them, how could we add a twist to the card game. \nSome were easy some were not. Which leads us to...\n\n\n**2** - The wining theme: Life is your currency.\n\nWe were super happy with it. Necromancers are cool. Its my default class when playing games suchs as Wow, Guild Wars, Diablo, Hearthstone, etc and the theme was screaming Necromancers!!. \n\nAlso, mechanically it was one of the easier themes of the final round to adapt to our initial design. \nOur game concept didn\u2019t have a resources\/mana system so we this was not a breaking change. \n\nOur initial plan was having free cards of different colors and the oportunity cost of playing all cards of only one color was our resource management mechanic. So It was easy to add a currency system based on life layer on top of it. \n\nAt the end we removed the color based system because of scope issues. The game was still fun thanks to the need to pay cards with life.\n\n![sprites.png](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/2438b.png)\n\n![IMG_20190428_190935.jpg](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/243a5.jpg)\n\n*Necromancers don't like each other. Everybody knows that*\n\n\n**3** - Team compatibility and scope.\n\nPau and I have been working on projects together since university. \nSo we know how to organize work and what we are capable of doing. \nOur interests and skills are quite complementary. I like to think of crazy ideas, love game design and quickly prototype tons of unpolished features. Pau is super methodical and can spend a whole day polishing the smallest thing, he doesn't mind much about the design as long as it is fun and has good art skills.\n\nAfter having worked on a couple of game jams with physics based gameplay we moved to something more deterministic and turn based. It was the right choice.\n\nBeing able to work on the same physical place was a big plus.\n\n\n**What went wrong**\n\n**1** - We didn\u2019t have an artist in the team. \nLuckily, Pau drawing skills are awesome, but his programming skills are even better and he lost a lot of coding time to work on art.\n\n![first_anim.gif](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/24388.gif)\n*We did what we could*\n\n**2** - First jam as dads.\n\nBoth Pau and I have children now. That\u2019s why we skipped previous 10 ludum dares. \n\nFor this one we sealed dark pacts with our families. But anyway we spent half jam with the kids. \n\nAlso on sunday it was national elections day in our country and we had to go voting.\n\n[progress_1.gif](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/2438d.gif)\n*The game looked like this on saturdat night.*\n\n\n**3** - No sound = no glory\n\nBecause of the reasons above we had to reduce scope to the minimum. \n\nGameplay goes first. \nArt is fun. \nSound lost the battle.\n\nAnd it's a shame because sound makes games so much better.\n\n**4** - Re-learning Unity. \n\nWe spent too much time googling basic stuff. \nWhy do my scriptable objects break? How does animation work? \nOur last game jam was ludum dare 33. Many things have changed. Even more things we have forgotten.\n\n![2019-04-29.gif](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/22c3a.gif)\n*This is our final result*\n\nThat would resume our jam experience. How about yours?","comments":1,"comments-timestamp":"2019-05-04T09:34:19Z","created":"2019-05-01T20:11:17Z","files":[],"files-timestamp":0,"id":155768,"love":4,"love-timestamp":"2019-05-04T09:34:22Z","meta":[],"modified":"2019-05-04T09:34:22Z","name":"They Ran Out of Mana postmortem","node-timestamp":"2019-05-01T21:32:26Z","parent":150853,"parents":[1,5,9,139254,150853],"path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/44\/they-ran-out-of-mana\/they-ran-out-of-mana-postmortem","published":"2019-05-01T21:32:26Z","scope":"public","slug":"they-ran-out-of-mana-postmortem","subsubtype":"","subtype":"","type":"post","version":468378},"node_metadata":{"n_key":"155768","n_urlkey":"348039","n_parent":"150853","n_path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/44\/they-ran-out-of-mana\/they-ran-out-of-mana-postmortem","n_slug":"they-ran-out-of-mana-postmortem","n_type":"post","n_subtype":"","n_subsubtype":"","n_author":"122425","n_created":"1556741477","n_modified":"1556962462","n_version":"468378","n_status":"WAYBACK"},"source_url":"https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/44\/they-ran-out-of-mana\/they-ran-out-of-mana-postmortem","text":"Hi after finishing the jam and updating a couple of fixes, we can now share out experience. So here is our postmortem.\n\nIf you want to know what I'm writting about, here is our game.\n\nhttps:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/44\/they-ran-out-of-mana\n\n**What went right:**\n\n**1** - Game design freeze before the jam. \n\nWhen Pau and I decided to join the jam some months ago we agreed that doing a card game would be fun. \n\n![progress_2.gif](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/24385.gif)\n*Cards everywhere!*\n\nA few weeks ago I came our with an abstract game mechanic. The idea was to put a theme on it based on the winning one. \nThe initial design was more complex of what we ended up doing, but gave us a lot of focus and saved us valuable time. When the final round of themes was announced we imagined, for all of them, how could we add a twist to the card game. \nSome were easy some were not. Which leads us to...\n\n\n**2** - The wining theme: Life is your currency.\n\nWe were super happy with it. Necromancers are cool. Its my default class when playing games suchs as Wow, Guild Wars, Diablo, Hearthstone, etc and the theme was screaming Necromancers!!. \n\nAlso, mechanically it was one of the easier themes of the final round to adapt to our initial design. \nOur game concept didn\u2019t have a resources\/mana system so we this was not a breaking change. \n\nOur initial plan was having free cards of different colors and the oportunity cost of playing all cards of only one color was our resource management mechanic. So It was easy to add a currency system based on life layer on top of it. \n\nAt the end we removed the color based system because of scope issues. The game was still fun thanks to the need to pay cards with life.\n\n![sprites.png](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/2438b.png)\n\n![IMG_20190428_190935.jpg](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/243a5.jpg)\n\n*Necromancers don't like each other. Everybody knows that*\n\n\n**3** - Team compatibility and scope.\n\nPau and I have been working on projects together since university. \nSo we know how to organize work and what we are capable of doing. \nOur interests and skills are quite complementary. I like to think of crazy ideas, love game design and quickly prototype tons of unpolished features. Pau is super methodical and can spend a whole day polishing the smallest thing, he doesn't mind much about the design as long as it is fun and has good art skills.\n\nAfter having worked on a couple of game jams with physics based gameplay we moved to something more deterministic and turn based. It was the right choice.\n\nBeing able to work on the same physical place was a big plus.\n\n\n**What went wrong**\n\n**1** - We didn\u2019t have an artist in the team. \nLuckily, Pau drawing skills are awesome, but his programming skills are even better and he lost a lot of coding time to work on art.\n\n![first_anim.gif](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/24388.gif)\n*We did what we could*\n\n**2** - First jam as dads.\n\nBoth Pau and I have children now. That\u2019s why we skipped previous 10 ludum dares. \n\nFor this one we sealed dark pacts with our families. But anyway we spent half jam with the kids. \n\nAlso on sunday it was national elections day in our country and we had to go voting.\n\n[progress_1.gif](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/2438d.gif)\n*The game looked like this on saturdat night.*\n\n\n**3** - No sound = no glory\n\nBecause of the reasons above we had to reduce scope to the minimum. \n\nGameplay goes first. \nArt is fun. \nSound lost the battle.\n\nAnd it's a shame because sound makes games so much better.\n\n**4** - Re-learning Unity. \n\nWe spent too much time googling basic stuff. \nWhy do my scriptable objects break? How does animation work? \nOur last game jam was ludum dare 33. Many things have changed. Even more things we have forgotten.\n\n![2019-04-29.gif](\/\/\/raw\/93e\/d1\/z\/22c3a.gif)\n*This is our final result*\n\nThat would resume our jam experience. How about yours?","title":"They Ran Out of Mana postmortem","wayback_source":[]}