Greetings traveler!

with LD31 having taken place about a week ago I thought it’s time for a recap and why not do a postmortem?

Play Frenzy Snowman Smasher here

 

Good Stuff

Framework

With HaxeFlixel we decided for a tool that was quite new to us. Having worked with SFML, SFML.NET and Unity recently on various (Ludum Dare) projects (please feel free to check out our site) we felt like using HaxeFlixel this time. To make it short, it worked out great!

Creating a project is as easy as it can get with templates. You don’t need to introduce libraries or tweak linker settings. Instead you start with a game loop and you’re ready to go for mechanics.

HaxeFlixel might not be as well documented as Unity, the community is not as large (ever tried googling a Unity problem? Chances are high you’ll find a solution), but HaxeFlixel ships with an equally equipped tool kit (at least for 2d) for maths, tweens, timing, sprites, audio, pathfinding and even some graphical effects. This is one major advantage, since you can do most stuff super fast and without checking an asset store.

Additionally you can deploy to different plattforms without any hassle. The web target can be met using Flash (works fine) and HTML5 (works partially) which is great to lower the barrier of getting people to play (and rate!) your game.

Teamwork

We (@Thunraz and @Laguna_999) have worked together on numerous projects and know the style and preferences of the other one very well.  So while I was responsible for the audio stuff, I left most of the graphics to my partner. Both of us worked on the code.

The experience of a teammate is worth alot and I can only recommend working in a team. You will definitely  have much more fun and you can achieve more in the same time (probably not 2.00 times as much for 2 people, but with well trained teams it surely can be around 1.85). But you will also learn a lot from your teammate and get another view on game mechanics, aesthetics and content.

Someone to talk to about your ideas, concepts and algorithms and who gives instant feedback is very valuable!

Being in the flow

For me this Ludum Dare I was really “in the flow”. I didn’t notice this that much when I was doing all the work, but when I skimmed through the images for my timelapse video (always check if  you need to drop any, because of private chat sessions, passwords or addresses visible!) I realized I worked very straightforward and was very concentrated. Ok, I did surf the LD page very often but this is part of Ludum Dare for me.

In retrospect this was a great experience!

Social activities

We both joined social activities on Saturday evening. It is important for me to get my mind free to talk to some people and to get away from the screen – at least for some hours.

One day early

For the jam you have additional time (compared to the compo) but since I had to get to work on Monday, we finished early on Sunday evening. Which left us plenty of time for letting some friends test our game and receiving really valuable feedback.

With the additional time we also had some distance to the project and could judge (at least some parts) of the game better and add some improvements.

Scope

One thing we both liked about developing Frenzy Snowman Smasher was that the scope of the project was very clear and limited. There was not much place for feature creep (but the features implemented are hopefully very juicy :D) and this was a good thing.

Especially in hindsight of our LD30 entry that has been very ambitious. We implemented features to the last minute, leaving us almost no time for improvements, play tests and further iterations. We did a lot better on this Ludum Dare.

Bad stuff, room for improvement & what we have learned

Scope

Which immediately brings me to the major disadvantage of our project: it’s not special (you can find plenty of top down shooters this time) and the idea is almost generic. Ok, the game was built in a very limited time frame but when I see what other people have accomplished in this short time, I think we could have done better.

Balancing

One point almost everyone mentions is the difficulty of the game. We created a super hard version after the jam has ended though.

This is a hard one, since as a developer you spend playing your game a lot over during development. You know all the tricks and flaws of controls, how power-ups or weapons behave and how enemies react. For me it is really hard to get the numbers (like enemy spawn rate, health, speed, damage, etc.) to feel good. This is probably due to the game’s genre where balancing is more crucial than for e.g. a platformer. But I should look for some literature on this subject, because it feels like I can approach this on an almost scientific level.

Presentation

When it comes to presenting our ideas or even game play, I think we lack some talent. I forced myself to write tweets now and then and also did some posts on the Ludum Dare blog, but I think more people would probably play or even notice Frenzy Snowman Smasher if there were more high quality screenshots, some pre-finished soundtracks, or even funny bugs.

 

A big thank you to everyone who has read this far! As you can see we are quite happy with the result and how it worked out.

Let us know how you tackle those problems. There is always room for improvements!

Best Regards,
runvs