{"author_name":"alect","cat":"LD #25","comments":[],"epoch":1355861760,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"47490","p_author":"alect","p_authorkey":"4792","p_urlkey":"83155","p_title":"Cruel Cruel Dastard Postmortem","p_cat":"LD #25","p_event":"LD25","p_time":"1355861760","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"4792","us_name":"alect","us_username":"alect","event_start":"1355443200","event_key":"14","event_name":"LD25"},"text":"

A little bit belated, but here’s my postmortem for Cruel Cruel Dastard (play and rate it here<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Things that went well<\/b><\/h3>\n

Recording my own sounds:\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Usually when I’m working on jam games I tend to make heavy use of free sound libraries (such as\u00a0freesound.org<\/a>) and content generators (such as\u00a0bfxr<\/a>). Since the main Ludum Dare Compo disallows use of sound libraries, I decided to give recording my own sounds a try. It turns out recording sounds was actually a lot easier than I imagined (and also a ton of fun).<\/p>\n

Under normal circumstances, I might have spent ages searching through a free sound library for a train sound. While recording my own sounds, all I had to do was record myself blowing into paper and then tweak the result in\u00a0Audacity<\/a>\u00a0to get what I wanted. Everyone who plays the game seems to love\u00a0the evil laugh<\/a>\u00a0I included as a victory noise. That thing is basically just my own voice sped-up and it only took me about a minute to make, so I’ll definitely be recording my own sounds more in the future.<\/p>\n

Re-doing the controls halfway through: \u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

When I started making the game, the idea was that it had a simple “click to place things on screen” control scheme. To build a large amount of train tracks, the player would have to place each piece of the track individually and switch to a different shape every time the track turned. To illustrate, here’s a screenshot from the game on day one:<\/p>\n

\"notice<\/a>

notice how each shape has its own menu item<\/p><\/div>\n

If this sounds like a terrible and tedious control scheme to you, well\u00a0you’re right!<\/i>\u00a0About halfway through the competition, I decided to scrap this scheme and make a much more intelligent track building system that allows the player to lay tracks or re-route existing tracks just by dragging their mouse across the screen. Even though it took a good chunk of time to implement, I think it was a pretty good idea, particularly since it’s now much easier to build tracks in the game than in my level editor.<\/p>\n

\"still<\/a>

still have to choose pieces by hand<\/p><\/div>\n


\n Practicing Art Beforehand:\u00a0<\/b>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

I was using the\u00a0Make Pixel Art<\/a>\u00a0web app for making my art. I like this program because it’s really simple\u00a0and\u00a0<\/i>it has super useful “lighten” and “darken” tools that I can’t seem to find anywhere else (if you know how to get the same thing in photoshop or gimp, please tell me).<\/p>\n

Of course, it’s simplicity has some drawbacks, such as not being able to easily constrain the size of your drawings. Fortunately, with a week of practice beforehand, I was able to get past these problems via silly solutions such as creating “frame” templates.<\/p>\n

\"makepixelart\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Things that didn’t go so well<\/h3>\n

No Time for Levels:\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Hey look at that! I kind of mismanaged my time for this jam. My original intention for the last day was to do some basic polish, make a few designed levels to introduce the mechanics (complete with tutorial text), and then build a procedural generation system for making the game more of an arcade style puzzle game (like tetris) rather than a deterministic puzzle game (like a rubiks cube).<\/p>\n

If that sounds kind of over-scoped to you,\u00a0you’re correct!<\/i>\u00a0I was still adding polish on Sunday when I looked at the clock and realized I only had one hour left and no levels to speak of yet. It didn’t help that my level editor wasn’t fully set up yet either.<\/p>\n

In the end, I had to scramble all ten of the levels together in less than 20 minutes, which basically meant I got the tutorial levels in and not much else. Whoops!<\/p>\n

Poor Prioritization:\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Part of the reason I ran out of time on Sunday was definitely due to poor prioritization. There are a bunch of mechanics in the game that are either not explored fully or not properly implemented at all (such as the rope mechanic). I think if I had done a better job pruning these ideas down to only about two or three basic mechanics (say, laying railroad tracks and dynamite), I wouldn’t have run out of time towards the end.<\/p>\n

Also, certain pieces of polish that would be essential for a larger release–The “undo” button in particular–might not have been really necessary for a 48 hour game, particularly one as short as this one, so I might have benefitted from focusing more on the core gameplay.<\/p>\n

Playing it “Safe”:<\/b><\/p>\n

One of my goals for this weekend was to create something fairly polished that I could easily expand upon for a bigger release. In practice, this meant that I discarded a bunch of ideas during the planning phase that were a lot more experimental or interesting because I wasn’t sure I could expand them into something worthwhile in only 48 hours.<\/p>\n

Of course, this means I ended up designing a game that was distressingly similar to games I’ve made in the past. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (plenty of people riff on the similar concepts several times before moving on), I think I could have benefited from going with one of my wilder ideas.<\/p>\n