{"author_name":"df458","cat":"LD #22","comments":[],"epoch":1325802780,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"59963","p_author":"df458","p_authorkey":"7153","p_urlkey":"95715","p_title":"Postmortem \u2013 Leave Black Alone","p_cat":"LD #22","p_event":"LD22","p_time":"1325802780","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"7153","us_name":"df458","us_username":"df458","event_start":"1323993600","event_key":"8","event_name":"LD22"},"text":"<p>Here&#8217;s a very late postmortem for my game <em><a title=\"Leave Black Alone\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-22\/?action=preview&amp;uid=7153\" target=\"_blank\">Leave Black Alone<\/a><\/em>. To be honest, I&#8217;m surprised at the fairly positive feedback I&#8217;ve been getting, considering that I&#8217;m not really too fond of it.<\/p>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <h3><strong>The Good:<\/strong><\/h3>\n <ul>\n <li>Choosing to use Game Maker. I know a bit of Java, but it would&#8217;ve been a nightmare for me trying to make this with it. I&#8217;ve spent enough time with Game Maker that I found the coding to be fairly painless.<\/li>\n <li>The idea, because I think it&#8217;s fairly original take on Alone, even if the story was just sorta pasted on towards the end.<\/li>\n <li>For the most part, I managed to stay focused on the game.<\/li>\n <li>Getting someone to look at the game from time to time. If not, I might have kept my original graphics, and they would&#8217;ve scorched off your eyeballs&#8230; Instead, I made a simple and somewhat more pleasing color scheme. My tester also caught one or two bugs that I wouldn&#8217;t have known about otherwise. Also, there wouldn&#8217;t be a hint button if my tester hadn&#8217;t had so much trouble with the puzzles.<\/li>\n <li>Getting lots of sleep on Saturday, even though I wasn&#8217;t very tired. I felt exhausted later on Sunday even with the extra sleep, so I imagine it would have been even harder to actually finish the dang thing.<\/li>\n <li>Finishing the game! This was my very first LD ever, so I&#8217;m really happy that I managed to finish.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <h3><strong>The Bad:<\/strong><\/h3>\n <ul>\n <li>Sound. If you&#8217;ve played my game, you&#8217;ll notice that the sound effects aren&#8217;t that great and there&#8217;s no music to speak of. This was my first time ever really messing with music and sound, and it shows. I used bfxr for sound and pxtone for (attempted)music, but I hadn&#8217;t ever used bfxr before. Next time, I&#8217;ll need to practice making music and sound a bit.<\/li>\n <li>The level design process. Game Maker&#8217;s room editor is nice, but it would&#8217;ve helped to setup a small level editor , especially later on Sunday when I was scrambling to make levels. I also didn&#8217;t really know what to do with all the elements of the game, which is why I kept adding new stuff even as the last level loomed.<\/li>\n <li>The tutorial system. I like it, but my tester hardly even looked at it, despite the fact that it&#8217;s the only place with any instruction to speak of. If you rate my game, please tell me whether you used it or not.<\/li>\n <li>I used collision detection for everything, when I really should have used an array. This came back to haunt me later, when I desperately tried and failed to fix a horde of weird bugs regarding the powerups. In the end, I had to design around them, and I hated that. If you see an off center powerup, you know the cause.<\/li>\n <li>The win screen and story screen. I thought it would be cool to try messing with blender to make a cool win screen, but instead it took quite a while and produced a pretty terrible result. It would have been simpler for me to use the gimp and drawn it. As for the story screen, it was just a tacked on extra, and I really should have either put a little more time into it, or not had it at all.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <div>So there you have it. If you have a minute or two, please play and rate my game!<\/div>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/postmortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"January 5th, 2012 5:33 pm","title":"Postmortem \u2013 Leave Black Alone"}