So! I didn’t finish my entry. I submitted it, but it wasn’t finished and I can’t help but feel a little defeated. The levels needed more design and more content, I wanted to add a jetpack (mobility enhancers are mandatory in metroid games :P), 2 more guns, at least 2 more types of enemies, a boss fight, and narration. I’d have been happy to have gotten there, but looking back… I was pretty screwed.<\/p>\n
So I’ll start with my mistakes<\/strong>, first:<\/strong><\/p>\n – Not the base code I wanted: <\/strong>I had planned on prepping some base code beyond Flixel (perhaps even writing my own flash game engine), but didn’t get around to it. This alone isn’t a huge deal, since the starting point I had is still quite good.<\/p>\n – A bit lost: <\/strong>Not much dev experience with the sort of game I was trying to build. Coding wise, it was mostly pretty simple 2d logic, but if I had had more experience, I would’ve used (or created) a level editor and I would’ve gotten the characters up and running much faster. Not to mention I would’ve prioritized dev for gameplay features a lot better. At least I learned a lot!<\/p>\n – Bad planning with my time:<\/strong> On top of mistakenly thinking I had 2 hours longer than I really did, I wasn’t really in gear on Saturday, yet Saturday accounted for more than 1\/2 of my dev time. I still got a lot done on Saturday, but I left a lot of important stuff for Sunday, stuff that would’ve allowed me to begin designing levels much sooner.<\/p>\n Point by point:<\/strong><\/p>\n – Gameplay<\/strong>: I wasn’t trying to do anything particularly clever, just good fun sidescrolling, action\/adventure gameplay. I do like what I got, but it was a shadow of what I wanted. Unfortunately the game is such that more gameplay depth requires a fair amount of new content, which is time intensive, which makes it a bad fit for LD. Still, of the stuff I did get around to adding,\u00a0 I feel like I got it right.<\/p>\n – Art<\/strong>: I’m really enjoying drawing sprites, it’s not something I normally do. I love the walk animation on the guys! I might try drawing some sprites in my free time now. With some more practice, I think I could put more detail into my characters.<\/p>\n – Graphics<\/strong>, tech wise<\/strong>: My shadow implementation could be way better, but despite this, I was able to make it look okay. It tripped me out when I realized I was placing static lights in my levels as decoration! The fx and such were okay, but now I want to make a serious fx-oriented particle system.<\/p>\n –Sound!!!<\/strong>: This one really tore me up. I wanted to use pretty realistic sounds and couldn’t bring myself to use sfxr. That left me in a pretty bad spot, so I just gave up. Lame!<\/p>\n Overall?<\/strong> I like it. It can be played and enjoyed. But it’s clearly unfinished. It makes me want to work on it more.<\/p>\n And a parting thought:<\/strong><\/p>\n I didn’t realize this at first, but looking back, I clearly approached this LD as an excuse to prototype a game – but not necessarily finish a game. Next time I’ll be seriously considering going for a smaller game design.<\/p>\n \n Tags: post-mortem<\/a>, postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"August 31st, 2009 8:22 pm","title":"contact lost post mortem"}