Get Your Goat – Game

I entered into this compo very nearly at the last minute. I lucked out with five days remaining before the event and was able to get the time off of work. As I missed LD#22 due to life, #23 due to work, and dropped out of #24 due to a six hour power outage on Saturday, I was extremely excited to be able to participate in this one.

My goal of this jam was simple: Improve upon my LD#21 entry. For LD#21, I started with zero base code, used Flash CS4 as an IDE, did not have any sprite or sound tools set up or had any knowledge on how to use them prior to the jam. I was not well prepared, but still managed to finish. My entry was very unpolished and was not really play tested. Thus, the goal of my LD#25 entry was create a more polished and fine tuned game that I considered better than my first.

Unfortunately, I do not believe I fully succeeded in my goal. Time-wise, I was ahead of where my previous entry was and some parts of the game were better polished. However, I still ended up performing the 3 hour-remaining crunch to knock out all my art and sound assets. This game uses about two to three times the amount of art and sound over my LD#21 entry. As a result, my art assets were half-done, sound is half-done and one major bug and game balance issues were present in my submission.

This Ludum Dare was a great learning experience, even better than my previous one. I now know exactly what skills I need to improve on in between jams and what I need to focus more on while jamming.

What went right

• My pipeline– Much improved over LD#21. I was able to produce more assets at a much quicker rate.
• Adaptation– Midway through the compo, I discovered that my path finding had a non-trivial bug on top of generating paths too slowly. I was faced with the choice: Stop all development to fix the bug and optimize the code, or redesign the game so I would never encounter the bug or have to generate more than one path. I chose the latter. I feel that if I had tried to debug and optimize, I may not have finished the compo on time.
• Fixed some things from my first jam– Trying to not be too hard on myself, I did end up fixing some of the problems and issues I encountered in my first jam.
  

What went wrong

• Scope– Once again, scope popped up to bite me in the butt. This time it wasn’t gameplay related but it was simply that I shouldn’t have attempted a rts style game. Although, I now have some code I can clean up and port to the next Ludum Dare for another rts game.
• Dealing with distractions– On Saturday, I had some work distractions pop up. I wasn’t able to concentrate fully for a few hours and lost some of my most productive time.
• I’m awful at making sprites– Put simply, I am incredibly bad at making quality sprites in a decent amount of time. This is something I will need to practice between now and the next Ludum Dare if I hope to produce a better quality game. I sort of know what I want things to look like in a general sense. For the life of me, I cannot translate that onto a sprite.