This is my first LD so I don’t have anything to compare to, but I actually think overall I did pretty well. I’m not sure I can say what I did write and what I did wrong, being new to the compitition and game developement in general, but I can say what I did at least.

Ideas

I didn’t really have much trouble coming up with an idea. My first thought was to make the game incredibly happy looking (flowers, smiley faces, etc.) and then have a freakish wall of death, but it relied on graphics and I had no thoughts for game play to back it up. Really, it seemed you could either take the theme literally and make a wall of doom chasing you, or you could interpret it to make some sort of art game.

I chose to just make a wall of doom. I didn’t really think of the game play mechanics at first, just started making the player graphic. I guess I did that wrong, but I just wanted to start coding and see what I’d end up with. The final version ended up pretty well balanced, I think, but so many things could have gone wrong to ruin it entirely.

Code

Using Construct made the coding pretty easy for someone as new to game developement as me, although I do hope to enter LD some day using “real” code. The game required a lot of things I’d never done before. The player remained in the center of the screen the entire time and the ground went on for ever, so instead of programming the player to move I moved everything into a family that moved when the arrow keys were pressed. I started making animations for the ground to move, but it didn’t look to great and skipped when you stopped or changed directions. I ended up scrapping the animations and applying a warp behavior to the ground so it would scroll endlessly, which looked much smoother but did have some slight tearing issues but not a major problem.

The main thing I had trouble with was spawning buildings and enemies randomly, and I never entirely got all the bugs out, but it worked pretty well in the end. The main issue was buildings overlapping each other, and I never entirely fixed it. Enemy AI was easy until I found some game breaking glitches in my code I couldn’t fix. I ended up just skipping it and comming back later, but I did find a solution. 

Overall it went pretty well, there were a few stressful moments where the game seemed to destroy itself and I wanted to give up but nothing to major.

Sound

The sound might have been the easiest part of the game. I used sfxr for all the sound effects and Musagi (along with a tutorial) to make the music. I’ve had complaints on the music being repetitive, due to the fact that I’ve never made music before so I just looped the 30 seconds I had throughout the entire game. And thats pretty much it for sound.

Graphics

Graphics were easy to, as I just made a sprite whenever I needed one. I decided to keep everything simple because a) Complicated art takes time and for me wouldn’t even end up looking to good and b) (basically the reverse of a) Simple art can be made quickly and often ends up very eye pleasing. Most of the graphics I made at the begining of development, except for the helicoptor blob, which I threw in at the end to varry the game a bit. Only complaint anyones had with the graphics so far is that the magic looks like blue sperm.

Conclusion

I’ve been very pleased with the feedback from people in LD14 and from others I’ve showed the game to. We’ve been having competitions in my web design class to get the high score (currently at 6000 something) and its ended with some pretty awkward quotes, to (“I had mad money but I couldn’t find a dude castle.”). I went ahead and fixed some of the problems people had with it and updated the game post LD. One complaint was that the game isn’t varried enough, to which I have no excuse. I finished the game around 4:00 on Sunday (I think) and uploaded the final version. I had plenty of time to add some more features, but I guess I was just to burnt out. I worked almost nonstop on the game, and the break I had on Saturday was to go outside on a hot day and shovel mulch for two hours. But overall I’m happy with it. I actually managed to take everything I had in my idea and work it into the game, and it worked out pretty nicely. The game is far from perfect, but I’m fine with it.