{"author_name":"Desi Quintans","cat":"LD #24","comments":[{"author_name":"","time":"August 26, 2012 3:56 pm","epoch":1346014560,"text":"I look forward to playing it!<br \/>\n And I went for a similar approach with the theme. In fact, I made the player get weaker over time \ud83d\ude00<br \/>\n What do you mean by &#8220;creation pipeline&#8221;?","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1346014020,"likes":3,"metadata":{"p_key":"52280","p_author":"Desi Quintans","p_authorkey":"14456","p_urlkey":"87979","p_title":"A post-mortem of Additive, pre-feedback","p_cat":"LD #24","p_event":"LD24","p_time":"1346014020","p_likes":"3","p_comments":"1","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"14456","us_name":"Desi Quintans","us_username":"desiquintans","event_start":"1345766400","event_key":"12","event_name":"LD24"},"text":"<p>I submitted about fifteen minutes ago, so I don&#8217;t have any feedback rolling in yet. I think this is a great time to write a post-mortem before the details are lost. I can do another one after my game is rated.<\/p>\n <h2><strong>What went great<\/strong><\/h2>\n <ul>\n <li><strong>I knew my strengths and weaknesses when I went in.<\/strong> Specifically, I knew that I was poor at art, AI, animation and music. This helped me direct my game ideas away from genres where I&#8217;d be weak. Knowing I was bad at art and music informed my aesthetic decisions too.<\/li>\n <li><strong>Doing a puzzle game for LD was a great choice. <\/strong>A puzzle game has depth when it has as few pieces\/behaviours as possible. This directly worked against feature creep. My experience with 2D arrays from <a href=\"http:\/\/cowfacegames.com\/dev-blog\/having-gone-back-on-my-clever-ways\">another project<\/a> also came in handy with this one (or really any other puzzle game played on a board).<\/li>\n <li><strong>I used a notebook. <\/strong>I got myself a visual arts diary with unlined pages, and I had some colored pencils. It helped me figure things out and allowed me make to-do lists that were serious business, and not just scrawled on the back of scrap paper.<\/li>\n <li><strong>I set some time aside to brainstorm ideas.<\/strong> When the theme was announced I put everything aside and made a mind map of all the things associated with the theme. I latched on to the idea of evolution being a gradual change in anything, not just biological, and trying to fit this into a puzzle game resulted in my concept.<\/li>\n <li><strong>I made a level creation pipeline.<\/strong> And by &#8216;pipeline&#8217;, I mean it loaded a .txt file and parsed it into tiles. Much better than doing things in the editor, though.<\/li>\n <li><strong>I didn&#8217;t drink much coffee.<\/strong> I found that it just made me feel a bit ill.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <h2>What went poorly<\/h2>\n <ul>\n <li><strong>Designing puzzle levels is painful.<\/strong> If I do another puzzle game, I will do mathematical puzzles so that I can generate them procedurally. I ended up arranging cutouts of color names on grid paper, working backwards from a semi-solved state.<\/li>\n <li><strong>Not colorblind-friendly. <\/strong>I&#8217;m really, really sorry. <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/frownie.png\" alt=\":(\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/> The next puzzle game I make will be based on symbols, I pinky-promise.<\/li>\n <li><strong>Not enough time to deepen the mechanics.<\/strong> I think the behaviours of the tiles are too similar, but I didn&#8217;t have time to iterate over changes.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <h2>Conclusion<\/h2>\n <p>Until now I&#8217;ve only finished one crappy minigame. This was my first LD, and I delivered a polished game within 45 hours that I am really quite pleased with. I couldn&#8217;t be happier!<\/p>","time":"August 26th, 2012 3:47 pm","title":"A post-mortem of Additive, pre-feedback"}