I’d like to write a few a short post mortem about my LD 30 entry called “Two Worlds” (second prize for original title?). I think if I’ll wait a few days longer I’ll never finish it. So… This was my first Ludum Dare and I’m very happy with my results – I’ve made a finished – but pretty simple and unpolished – game. I was able to overcome my usual difficulties with game making – low motivation, focusing on some time-consuming useless features and, mostly, unfinished, half-working parts.

Two Worlds – interactive “strategy” game.

What went right:

1. Fixed GUI. I was using old version of NGUI for Unity and wasn’t sure how it will work with modern scaleable UI. I decided to use fixed elements size and position. And that was one of the greatest discovery for me. On my another project I spend about 70% of time making “cool” interface, with scaling, draggable elements etc. If only I made something simple and fixed before – I think that project would be finished by now, not frozen for X months. For my compo game, I’ve made UI in about 2 hours and didn’t change it at all for the whole two days. And that was amazing.
2. Feature cut. I’ve got a lot of elements planned. Most of them made it into a game, but wasn’t as deep and complex as I wanted at first. Usually, i’d like to make some complex system with many elements, random text generation, results etc. For the first time I said “Stop!” to myself and made everything just simple and fuctional.
3. Focus. I’ve spend two days just. making. a. game. I think I was going to a shop for some food, but that’s all. Good sleep, comfortable room and no distractions – I think that’s all you really need to make something.

What went wrong:

1. Presentation. Black screen with colored buttons just doesn’t look cool. And it’s completly lost on screen with other competitors. And it doesn’t look interesting at all. Also, I’ve spend too much time in development, missing all the “Developer Logs”, streams, discussions etc. I think things would be much better if I spend 1/4 of my time just writing about game, talking with other devs, and maybe improving my visuals a little.
2. Playtesting. I didn’t understood that some of my cool features like “second trade option” was used by really low percent of players and the most used game options are the least fun. I think it’s really important to give someone your prototype and watch how fun it is to play and what actions the player will actually do instead of what YOU think he’ll do.
3. Polishing. Everything is working, that’s a good thing. But there are many parts to be improved. And thou feature cut saved me a lot of time, some parts could be better.
4. Progress bars. I always loved turn-based text games, like my own. But in some compo game I saw progress bars. You click on action, get the progress bar and just wait a little. And then you can click again. And then I realised, that I should use progress bars instead of turns and actions too! This can really improve game dynamic. You can have one huge progress bar for portal opening (like 30-45 seconds) and cooldowns on each possible action (grow resource, train troops). This can be really fun! And it’s really easy to balance the whole thing just by adjusting time! But then I understood that 48 hours passed about two days ago and became sad. But I’ll use progress bars and cooldowns in some future project.

I hope you’ve got something interesting from my post

Tags: Two Worlds