All in all I wasn’t very pleased with my entry, but have seen a lot of good stuff. I think the quality this LD was very high.

There is just some time to do a postmortem for my game called: ‘You naughty beast’.

So what went right:

1.  I finished the game within 48 hours, which was one of my goals. It was very tight, and in the last minute I had to come up with a title (which I hate now).

2. It was more of a game then my previous effort (‘fun but not much of a game’).

3. Faster, tighter coding. I did some planning, made an actual class diagram, had a good system for difficulty tweaking, better imlemented intro animation technique.

4. Better preparation. This was my second LD, but I also made some games during the mini LD’s and had some experience with Flashpunk. Also, I brainstormed all the top-10 themes so my brain would come up with an idea moer readily.

And what didn’t go right:

1. My worst mistake: No practice in my method. I have had some experience with Flashpunk since the last LD, but decided not to go with pixelgraphics this time. I made sprites in Flash and wanted to convert them to spritemaps.  This gave all kinds of unforseen trouble and cost me WAY TO MUCH time.  To get the graphics at the right positioning and the collision the right way was a big pain. And Flashpunk did throw me some curve balls. It turned out, I didn’t understand it enough.

Because of this I ran out of time, I had no time to tweak the difficulty and some of the humour and gameplay had to be sacrificed (for instance no real end, just a score, no cutscene).

Conclusion: I should have used the warmup weekend.

2.  No objectivity. I  tried to finish my game in 48 hours, which didn’t leave any time to sit back and try to see how other people would play the game.  Ludum dare people play a lot of games in three weeks. They wont take the time to master a mediocre game. Most of the feedback was about the controls. I played my game so much during development, that I didn’t realise how troublesome they were.  Because of this my game was too difficult.

3. Finish within 48 hours. It was one of my goals this LD, but after investing a day for a post compo version, my game was A LOT better.

4. Take more time for my idea. I hated the theme and I grabbed the first idea that came up. It wasn’t bad, but could be better.

Next time I’ll aim for 48 hours, but 72 will be OK if that is what is needed. try to do it more  more relaxed and less ambitious, but have more fun.