48 hours and one wild ride later, my first ludum dare is finished.  I’m pretty happy with the end result and generally things went pretty smoothly.

Now onto what went wrong:

– My code is a mess: Like the horrifying lovecraftian all consuming elder god kind of mess, it’s covered in global variables, basically everything wrong to do with segmentation, and a lot of ungodly long methods, all sorts of bad practice stuff.

– I am not a musician: I didn’t spend too much time on the sound, but I’m not very happy with the way it turned out, I should have spend much more time learning my sound editing tools before the compo.

– Needed more time for puzzle elements: I’m not happy that basically the only mechanic for puzzle solving is just carrying boxes around, I would have liked it if there were some more interesting changes to the gameplay than ladders (which were quite rushed, and it shows).  Maybe if I had some kind of simple scripting system or something I could have implemented a basic adventure game sort of system, but oh well.

Well that was kind of a downer, now for what went right!

– No problem coming up with an idea for the theme: I came up my idea not 5 seconds after the theme was announced, having an idea in mind from the start definitley saved me time in the long run.

– Pixel art is fun: I really enjoy pixel art, and it makes for a good break from programming, over the past couple years I’ve been working on a pixel art game in my spare time, so I had plenty of practice, and the art went quickly.

– Super crude faked lighting makes the game look so much better: I’m really happy for a suggestion I got to add some basic lighting, it makes the game look a lot better with minimal effort, and plus it adds to the general moodyness to have some harsh shadows.

So what things should I keep in mind for next time?  I should definitely come up with some gameplay elements before diving into programming mechanics.  I need more practice making music and sound effects, because they really help in making a game feel “finished.  Last but not least, I should definitely look into making a personal code library to help keep my code clean by giving me more of a framework to work with.

I’m really looking forward to LD23, and I intend to play and rate every game if at all possible, it’ll be interesting to see what others have come up with.  Good luck to my fellow participants, I look forward to playing everyone’s games.

Tags: postmortem