{"author_name":"Arne","cat":"LD #16 - Exploration - 2009","comments":[],"epoch":1260784980,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"71764","p_author":"Arne","p_authorkey":"1491","p_urlkey":"107586","p_title":"The hindsight","p_cat":"LD #16 - Exploration - 2009","p_event":"LD16","p_time":"1260784980","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"1491","us_name":"Arne","us_username":"arne","event_start":"1260489600","event_key":"2","event_name":"LD16"},"text":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/hindsight2.jpg\"><img src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/hindsight2-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"hindsight2\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-14111\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/hindsight2-300x225.jpg 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/hindsight2-550x412.jpg 550w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/hindsight2.jpg 800w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>I just woke up and was able to play through my game. Here are a few things which went wrong:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>I spent too much time on enemy variants. I should have gone for more variants of the terrain tiles instead, to make the exploration more fun. Terrain tiles are faster to draw since they don&#8217;t rotate. A snow area and desert area could have been cool.\n <li>The title\/splash screen has a very flat landscape. I didn&#8217;t add any shadows or foggy background mountains.\n <li>I could have avoided combat altogether and focused on stealth exploration, sneaking by and grabbing the loot. It&#8217;s difficult to do a satisfying combat system in just a few hours. I had no time to make fun AI either.\n <li>The game gets too easy mid-end. I didn&#8217;t have time to play through it even once. Anyways, this means that it&#8217;s mostly laborsome to find the last treasures.\n <li>I should have made a few sounds. Without sound, one feels detached from the game. It&#8217;s harder to understand what is going on (especially taking hits in combat). Music adds atmosphere too, of course. I had an idea where the tile map drawing routine would generate ambient sounds.\n <li>I flipped two of the squid frames wrong. I didn&#8217;t notice because I had put most of them in a maze with high walls.\n <li>The main character looks like it is ice skating because of the scroll focus, but drawing 2 walk frames * 4 angles * 2 stances would have been too much work for me. I suppose it would&#8217;ve been less of a problem in a game where you move less.\n <li>Speaking of which, tapping the movement buttons is straining on the hand after a while.\n <li>Str(ength) should have been Att(ack) in the sidebar. I was thinking of drawing a background for the sidebar, but had no time left. The treasure were supposed to do things, but I didn&#8217;t have time for that either.\n <li> If Health = 0 Then FGameOver() &#8230; I guess this made sense at some point, but it doesn&#8217;t in the current version. I&#8217;m generally careful and put less than checks in because I know I might change stuff around or lose control of value ranges.\n <li> It would&#8217;ve been simple to couple the stats-up mechanic with the player&#8217;s current def\/att mode, giving the player a bit of a choice for stats development.\n <\/ul>","time":"December 14th, 2009 5:03 am","title":"The hindsight"}