Well, after somehow getting through Monday without actually falling asleep at my desk or something, it feels like the time is write for a bit of a general LD18 retrospective.

First off I want to say a huge thanks to everyone for making it such a huge and brilliant event. I had a really great time. This goes double for PoV, who made it run so smoothly despite being too busy to actually enter; and to the crowd in #ludumdare that made sitting in a room on my own for two days a far less antisocial way to spend my time than you might expect.

Speaking of sitting in a room on my own for two days.. Here’s a video of me doing just that. Apparently I fidget a lot.

Right, Post Mortem Time. I’ll put it behind the break so I don’t need to worry about spoilers. Or in other words, if you haven’t played my game yet, try it now 😀

During voting Enemies and Weapons was just about the only theme that I really didn’t fancy making a game for. Typically I try to make non-violent games, less for any moral reason, and more because they’ve been done before in so many different (and sometimes excellent) varieties. I was distinctly un-impressed when I woke up (at 5am!) on Saturday, and blinked blearily at the theme.

Given my initial reaction I was surprised to find a game idea I liked relatively quickly. I started off trying to find ways of putting a non-violent spin on the theme. I couldn’t find a metaphor that fit well enough, and I liked, so the non-literal approach wasn’t going to work. I then came up with the idea of a game in which the enemies are weapons and you desperately wish they weren’t. The prase “reluctant pacifist” stuck, but from early on I had this quite strong vision of a stereotypical game-y beefcake soldier, who is trying (and largely failing) to prevent his actions from destroying a (comparatively) innocent army.

The game ended up being a bit more violent than I’d initially planned, but the comedic bouncing of the enemies made that entirely worthwhile. I think/hope that, when played the pacifist way I captured a certain amount of that initial concept.

What went right:

These were to an extent a happy accident, originally I was going to go forth and just stick some regular shooter bullet spray fighting mechanics in, but, lead initially by the crouch-to-fire animations I put in I came up with something a lot more medative, and mechanically deep. I’ve stuck the game on newgrounds and kongregate, and this style hasn’t been winning all that many fans, but I don’t care, because *I* like it.

Over the last year or so I’ve been building up some real comfort and familiarity with a smallish set of tools, and now it’s really paying off in heaps. The reason I managed to find so much time to work on bits of my game was that I didn’t have to spend a moment thinking “How do I do this?!”, I could just get on with doing it.

It wasn’t a comic game until the first moment a dead enemy bounced about spinning wildly. That moment was basically the core moment the final mood of the game was decided, and it’s a mood I don’t generally strive for; but that I’m really happy with.

What went wrong:

The biggest problem with the game from my perspective is that the “get hit by a bullet to ‘jump’ higher” mechanic is too challenging to pick up from just observation. It is also a bit too challenging to actually execute sucessfully. A lot of people have quite reasonably been saying “You can’t get back up!”, and it’s something I really should have anticipated and dealt with.

Whilst I do like the idea of decending and re-ascending themeatically, combined with the previous mechanic it lead to a situation in which the difficulty spikes *massively* at the halfway point. This is plain old fashioned bad design, at that moment the difficulty should be going down not up for a moment, but the level layout I chose made that a little unworkable. Live and learn I guess.

Anyway, I think this might have been a little bit epic. Congratulations if you got through it all!

Till next time o/
Jonathan Whiting