My first Ludum Dare postmortem…

What a blast. What a horror.

Web developers are advised not to look at the source code – your sanity depends on it.  The code… it’s… well, it’s been hacked to bits.

What went right:

• Pre-planning and concept.
• Simple screens and menus.
• I’m a web developer so I did the web. But I wanted to stay away from stereo-typical web gamedev techniques: no 3D or canvas, just the DOM.
• Sending optimization considerations to the bit bucket.
• Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) makes stunningly-awesome and evocative music. And shares it. =D  Originally I’d planned to add to my collection but after passing the 48hr mark…  Hell yeah.
• Multiple views of the same objects (cards) worked well.
• The “10 second” theme did not present any real difficulty; when the extended mechanics are in place, it should improve the value of Scene cards.
• It’s entirely possible to play The Deep Dark without a computer.  Of course, you’ll currently need to print your own cards.

What went wrong:

• Pre-planning focused on the scene animation area of the engine; when it came time to implement, it was the first thing to break… The nested resumable timers sounded like a good idea but weren’t and forced a costly refactor about halfway through day 1.
• Hurried code caused a really nasty chain reaction of bugs on day 2… the more it got fixed the further it broke. What a pain and the root cause was a ridiculous, stupid-stupid error.
• I included schema for extended mechanics too early; should have waited until the core mechanic was complete.
• I completely underestimated the time to produce card images: started in Inkscape and ended up with paper and a marker.

And as a result…

• scene animations didn’t happen at all; the engine can place other cards within the displayed scene but the code is a steaming pile of awful.
• extended mechanics never happened. Examples: elemental affinities (earth/air/water/fire/spirit), special items & talismans, gold/rupees, inventory, the evil-eye and other mini-games (originally central to the concept).
• I missed the compo (48 hour) submission deadline. A buggy, minimum playable version was ready but there were only 5 cards (2 scenes, 2 encounters and an ally).

What’s coming:

• I’m sold on the concept and will be creating a proper sequel – albeit without the time pressure.
• Using my TicTacToe for OUYA demo, I intend to release the sequel on OUYA at the same time as the web.  The wife tells me to make it playable on Facebook so that’s a possibility too. 😉

Thank you all for this pleasantly horrifying experience.

/EOF

Edit: Add link to The Deep Dark entry.