Warning!
Reading this before playing the game may diminish the amount of enjoyment you would get out of it! I recommend you go HERE first. It’s not very long.

About The Game:
The game I ended up submitting to this Ludum Dare is a bit of an odd one that doesn’t really fall into any pre-defined genre, but it has elements of platformer, puzzle and adventure games in it. You navigate several worlds from a first-person perspective, try to figure out how they work and try to reach an arbitrary ending.

What Went Right:
-Getting ideas
After the announcement of the theme I went through my usual Ludum Dare routine of talking to people I know and then going for a walk in order to figure out what I should try making. I was able to come up with how I would implement the theme reasonably quickly, in that the player would be able to travel between the normal world, heaven, hell and a weird intermediate world.

The Four Worlds

-Aesthetics
Despite being very simple 3D graphics, I think I managed to make a fairly interesting looking game. Each world had its own atmosphere. (Although I think heaven was a bit lacking as it was added towards the very end of development) The water in the city world and the tentacle and eye filled things in hell are the elements I thought turned out the best

Tentacles, Water, A Sacrificial Altar and Platforms

-Gameplay Mechanics
I managed to keep the interactions the player could perform fairly simple in this game, but I feel they still made the game fun enough. I re-implemented an item picking up and carrying system I had used before in what is probably my favourite of my prior Ludum Dare entries: Reach the Moon

-Programming
I had very few problems implementing the features I wanted to and so minimised the amount of time I would spend scratching my head at a problem. Drawing diagrams on paper to help visualise the problem really helped me.

What Didn’t Go So Well:
-Time management
I had a bit of trouble staying motivated during the 48 hours, primarily because I wasn’t certain what I wanted the final game to be like, and so I took a fair few breaks. By 9pm on the Sunday evening (Perth time, so with about 12 hours remaining) I was very doubtful that I was going to finish. Thankfully I managed to stay focused for a few more hours (Thanks in part to the over-cheerfulness of the Katamari Forver soundtrack) and had my entry submitted by 2am.

-Audio
There is none. This was primarily a result of my time management. By 2am I didn’t really want to launch up SFXR and start putting sound effects where I thought they needed to be, and so decided near enough was good enough. I also know absolutely nothing about creating music. None of the Ludum Dare games I have ever made have any.

-Technical Issues
I only tested my game on my own computer. So by the time I woke up on Monday morning I had discovered that most PC’s could not handle the city world of the game. (Turned out all the people created too many vertex buffers for graphics cards to handle) I managed to sort this out eventually and make the game runnable.

Bonus findings:
This Ludum Dare I also tried hosting my game on some other websites, namely GameJolt and itch.io. It’s been really enjoyable being able to see how many people are viewing and downloading the game, with GameJolt having much greater amounts of people than itch.io.

Overall I think this Ludum Dare went very well and look forward to seeing the results and participating in the next one that I can.

Tags: LD30, post-mortem, postmortem