I guess I should post-mortem my game now that the ratings are out.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-27\/?action=preview&uid=7956<\/p>\n
Well, basically, my game wasn’t very good, but wasn’t particularly bad either. In fact, it got a 2.50 overall score, so I guess the word that comes to mind is ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’. I can deal with this.<\/p>\n
What went well:<\/p>\n
Haxepunk and my dodgy engine that’s slowly forming over the top of it:<\/strong><\/p>\n There are some parts of my code that aren’t sensible and it needs a lot of tuning, but I can make things fast and slot in code from other games and it just works without lots of copying and pasting and awfulness. In general the programming went very smoothly – sure, there were a few instances of getting tripped up for an hour or so while some stupid bug caused by my own stupidity wouldn’t die, but generally speaking the code flowed freely.<\/p>\n The music:<\/strong><\/p>\n I certainly didn’t expect to put this in the ‘things that went well’ section, and I feel kind-of bad that people liked the music because I spent about a minute in Otomata making it. It literally took no effort on my part and it was the very last thing I did before submitting and crashing.<\/p>\n What went poorly:<\/p>\n Time management:<\/strong><\/p>\n I had flat-zero ideas for the theme and if I hadn’t woken up and found it a rainy miserable day I probably would have given up. I started a full 24 hours late. I also spent a few hours at local festivals that were going on in the neighbourhood, though I don’t think that had much effect. I started work at 10am and submitted around 4am the next morning (deadline being 10am my time) – I probably should have used the remaining time to polish but it was playable and I didn’t care anymore.<\/p>\n The ‘features’:<\/strong><\/p>\n I tweeted around 3am: ‘Alright, there are no more bugs – only features!’.<\/p>\n Which is all well and good, but unfortunately no one else appreciated the ‘feature’ of the collision detection breaking 30 seconds in. It’s not as broken as most people thought, I think – you can still kill them with some effort and getting them to cross the hand a few times, but … yeah, it’s a bug that I decided not to fix because it was really late and I knew it would be really hard to fix. Plus it adds some challenge to the game so you can’t just sit in front of the hand … which is a stupid excuse. As my sister commented: ‘It’s really hard because at some point there’s so many guys breaking the rules that you can’t keep up’.<\/p>\n The movement bugs were well received though. There were actually no movement patterns besides ‘chase the player’, but when I changed a few values it appeared there were anyway. This is good, because that was part of the original plan that I didn’t get around to implementing.<\/p>\n The graphics:<\/strong><\/p>\n I can’t believe I went with a shit-green-and-grey colour scheme. Anything would have been better, and it would have taken ten seconds with the paint bucket tool.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Anyway, enough navelgazing. It’s a miracle I released anything, so I’m not complaining in any case.<\/p>","time":"September 18th, 2013 8:26 am","title":"post-mortem"}