This was my first Compo, and first Ludum Dare for that matter, and I decided to take a somewhat different approach than most games. With some inspiration drawn from former Ludum Dare winners (looking at you, "The Rock, the Paper, and the Scissors"), I decided to make a relatively simple game and put a much greater emphasis on the aesthetics and style than on the gameplay itself.

It turns out that frame-by-frame animation takes a whole lot of time. I've done a lot of digital art and cartoons in the past, but animation is another monster. I originally wanted to make eleven animation sequences for my game's character: idle, right and left jumping, and attacking in each cardinal direction and on the diagonals. After finishing the idle and one attack animations, I quickly realized this was infeasible in 48 hours along with finishing the game's code and writing the music.

Instead, I decided to use one attacking animation for all directions and simply reverse the jump-right animation when jumping left (ninja cat backflips, anyone?). While I could have (maybe) gotten all of the material created, I felt that it was a time and work commitment greater than is reasonable for how much it would improve the playing experience.

Overall, how do the quality/breadth of animations affect your gameplay experiences? Would you rather play a game that is very polished visually at the expense of the number of levels/smoothness of gameplay? Do you have a preference for computer-generated particle effects or for frame-by-frame animation for Ludum Dare games? Does your opinion change between Compo and Jam submissions?

You can download Seven Pillars here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4O5d69PTcqrdFpYNkFtOEdoSkE/view?usp=sharing