Now that I’ve had a bit of time to recover, I thought it was best to write this post mortem while things are still relatively fresh in my head.

Play and rate my Ludum Dare compo entry (Climb Monster Climb!) here.

This was my second Ludum Dare compo. The first time around I jumped in head first and dedicated every waking minute to the game I was making. In fact, I ended up only getting 6 hours of sleep the whole weekend. That was rough. I was determined to not let that happen again, so I needed an idea with much less scale. I also wanted an idea that was a little off beat and wasn’t going to be the same as everyone else. I didn’t want to go in the direction of the monster causing chaos and destruction, so I thought, what if the monster wasn’t a bad guy? Let’s make the monster a friendly guy and make the villagers the villains. Thus was born the idea for my game. A game where the monster has to run away from the angry mob of villagers by jumping up through a tower, with things getting more difficult the higher you get.

One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of LD platformers is that the controls are usually pretty bad. So I spent a good amount of time tuning and adjusting the controls. I first started out trying to use Unity’s 2D physics engine, but that was turning out very poorly. I then decided to scrap that and do my own basic physics, just using Unity’s collision detection. That worked much better.

Once I had the controls working pretty well, I started working on randomly generating levels for him to jump on, but realized pretty quickly it was going to take a lot of work to write something that would scale the difficulty with the current height as well as never producing levels that are impossible to traverse. Instead, I decided to make templates of 4 levels each, assign them a difficulty and have the world generator choose one at random from the pool of choices for the current difficulty. That worked really well. Once I had levels he could jump through, I needed to add bonuses for him to collect and hazards for him to avoid. I wanted to give the game a humorous aspect, so I made the bonuses flowers, bunnies and teddy bears, all things that a typical monster would want nothing to do with. It gives him a child-like innocence. I also made him say silly things when he collected them. The hazards are typical spikes and fire. Nothing very original there.

By Saturday evening, I had a complete working game. Sunday was spent on polish. I decided I didn’t like the pixel art so I grabbed the Wacom pen and started drawing. The results aren’t perfect, but are better than they were and then I moved onto sound and music. One of the major criticisms I had on my last game was that the music didn’t match the mood of the game, which I completely agreed with. This time I decided to learn a bit more about music creation and dedicated a couple hours to it. The music in this game is much better, but not as good as I would like.

With a few hours left before deadline, I wanted to give the angry mob more character. Up until this point they were pretty much non-existent. The monster died if he hit the bottom of the screen, but that’s it. In my head, I felt the angry mob would work better if they were always off screen, but I thought it would be funny if they had speech bubbles that appeared periodically as you play, shouting absurdities as they pursued the monster. I think it turned out to be a nice touch. If you play, be sure to read what they have to say after they catch the monster.

Another last minute decision that I feel was a good one was assigning colors to the various difficulties. It was hard to tell what difficulty you were at, but by changing the colors of the platforms, it became easily possible to know where you were, but also to measure you progress visually compared to previous runs.

This post mortem has gone on way longer than I anticipated, so I’ll cut it off here. Overall, I’m very pleased with my game. It’s fun and challenging and relatively well polished. If you try it, please let me know what you think. I’m also pleased that I was able to get full nights sleep both Friday and Saturday night, which made the weekend much more pleasant. I had a blast in my second Ludum Dare and I can’t wait until the next one!