{"author_name":"bnhw","cat":"LD #27","comments":[{"author_name":"","time":"August 29, 2013 11:33 am","epoch":1377793980,"text":"Really interested to read this. The game seemed so polished and effortless that it’s very interesting to hear how you approached it.","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1377786960,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"38090","p_author":"bnhw","p_authorkey":"3267","p_urlkey":"73706","p_title":"Anti-Grav Drive, a postmortem","p_cat":"LD #27","p_event":"LD27","p_time":"1377786960","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"1","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"3267","us_name":"bnhw","us_username":"raggy","event_start":"1377216000","event_key":"18","event_name":"LD27"},"text":"

Anti-Grav Drive<\/a> is a game about flying a half-broken spaceship through a planetary system and trying to survive as long as possible. Your thrusters are down and your only method of influencing your movement is through a cobbled-together, overclocked anti-gravity drive which you can turn on and off at will. Along with the long range scanners and a ten-second prediction routine, you aim to slingshot the ship around the planetoids and keep on truckin’.<\/p>\n

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What went well<\/h2>\n

My main criteria for the game was that I’d be able to make it in “about 2 hours” and spend the rest of the time polishing. These two hours only really included the basic gameplay, but it meant that I had plenty of room for error and improvement. It ended up taking longer than 2 hours (perhaps 3 or 4), but this meant that I pretty much had something that I could submit very early on, should something disastrous happen.<\/p>\n

What didn’t go so well<\/h2>\n

I over-obsessed on the visuals during the second day. In fact, half of the second day was spent on visuals that never made it to the final product. The green-on-black space horror sci-fi computer look was a fall-back option that I ended up defaulting to.<\/p>\n

Overall, my time management was pretty atrocious too. While I had a working prototype after only a few hours, these few hours were after I’d been sitting in the pub all evening. Most of the first day was spent chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool. I think I was quite lucky that I could pull together the music and the game balancing during the last hours of the competition.<\/p>\n

Lessons learned<\/h2>\n

Get it working.<\/strong>\u00a0Gameplay is the most important part of a game (certainly for the games I like to make). Although I did get a prototype working quickly, I think spending even longer on getting the progression and balancing working from the off could be beneficial.<\/p>\n

Set time limits.<\/b> It’s pretty easy to write down some numbers for the things Wot Your Game Needs. If I’d done this and was half-way through the allotted time for visuals without anything usable, maybe I could’ve stopped myself earlier and had more time for audio and balancing. Adding up a total number of hours also might’ve motivated me to work more during the first day to spread the load.<\/p>\n

Don’t worry about it!<\/strong> Yeah, I was pretty chilled throughout the competition. Even though I criticised myself for this and maybe I just got lucky with the idea, I think it came out pretty well without too much stress.<\/p>\n \n

Tags: post-mortem<\/a>, postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"August 29th, 2013 9:36 am","title":"Anti-Grav Drive, a postmortem"}