My brother did a great job presenting our LD29 participation. But he still asked me to write a post-mortem post on Ants at War. So, more than speaking technically about the project, I will focus on presenting my personal feedback on my first participation to a LD event.

Graphics

Being the developer of the project, I ran the game for a while with just colored square on the screen. It was already nice to see the things moving as expected but it was even nicer when the objects started to obtain their final look and animations. Importing the graphic into the game gave me two important points:

1. Adding the graphics, especially when they look nice, really boost yourself during the competition. So I think it’s a really good point to import them not too quickly to have something bringing back motivation when you start to be tired (this doesn’t mean that the time at which you will import the graphics will depend on your tiredness but just that it is a great side effect).
2. Graphics are not totally disconnected from programming and, in this sense, a part of them has to be imported completely (and not only in some test applications/scripts) to be sure that the whole chain from the graphic artist to the game does not bring any problem. In fact, as the graphic artist could prepare and export the graphics in different ways, the programmer has to check that the process is going the right way. Additionally it will give an information about the time you may need afterwards to import the whole and will help checking the game’s behaviour with the final graphics. Just to give an example on this last point, if you are checking collisions between objects according to the visual bitmap, you may have some trouble with noisy pixels (close to zero but non-zero pixels) in alpha channel (eventually, collisions in Ants at War are not dependant on graphics but it was the case at first).

External libraries

In my opinion, it is not a good idea to look for and use an external library you are not used to use. Having a limited time, it is better to focus on the game and ensure to be able to bring this game to an acceptable point than creating a kind of proof-of-concept using unknown libraries.

But, the second conclusion on this part is that even with known libraries, do not try to use them further than what you have already done in the past. During Ants at War conception I tried to create different perceptions of the environment for the ants. For example, the red ants would have not been affected in path-finding by black ants’ buildings (and vice versa). Using one map for path-finding was already well-known on my side, but using multiple maps eventually turned out to be not possible with the library used (in fact, in multiple maps scenario, one and just only one function of the library was always referring to the first map created). This is a waste of time and looking at the current result, using only one shared map is already good. Consequently, do not try to push libraries out of known states! You will probably not obtain something worth it but more certainly waste your time.

Conception

To finish this post-mortem post, perhaps just a note and conclusion on the way the game has been designed and what should have been done. With the limited time allowed, we focused almost completely on designing the game and make it work as expected. This may sound great but in fact it is loosing sight of one important point: the player. Even if we were playing the game to check that everything was working fine, we did not try to see it from players point-of-view. Therefore, the game was lacking enough explanations how to use and play it. We really should think and focus on the player, even if the time is short, during game conception.

Conclusion

This Ludum Dare participation was really great. A little bit stressful at beginning, I should admit, but worth it at the end. Jam competitions are great at allowing a team to work on the same project for a short time and to see progress in another area (like graphics, music and so on) what really boost yourself. So more than the result obtained, it is really this time shared with my brother on a specific project that made of this LD 29 a great and fun experience!

So, hopefully, see you another time for a new LD 😉

ouly