Here’s a very short behind the scenes of my game.

Timeline

Note: I’m in Europe so for me LD is from Saturday 3am to Monday 3am.

Saturday 8:00 am: Wake up. Open laptop. See announcement email. Oh sh******t, I’d completely forgotten LD was this week-end! But, but… I have plans for the week-end! Sorry guys, I’m definitely not participating this time.

Saturday 8:05 am: Two buttons… binary… I have an idea! *Starts coding*.
In one morning, I got numbers falling from the top, destroyed by typing binary.

Saturday afternoon: Go out because sometimes you have to pretend you’re not completely asocial and all that. Ended up being busy until pretty late, so no more progress on Saturday.

Sunday morning: More coding! Added points, game over, arithmetics, difficulty curve…

Sunday afternoon: WHY DO I HAVE TO VISIT FAMILY AND STUFF I HAVE *THINGS* TO DO.

Sunday night: More coding. At 8 pm, most of the gameplay was there, but here’s what the game looked like:

So in the time remaining I added some graphics (just a background image and some clouds), particle effects, intro and game over screens, sound effects and background music. I got to bed at 12:30 because I was working on Monday!

What went well

• Finished another game, yay! And it’s pretty much what I had planned, so I’m pretty happy about that.
• Got an idea in 5 minutes! Usually I spend hours brainstorming.
• Idea was simple. Usually I have to throw away 90% to make it remotely possible to code in a week-end.
• Got an actual *gameplay* idea! Usually I have vague idea for a thing with stuff and I still have no idea what my actual gameplay is until the very end.
• Phaser. I used a framework, yay. Makes adding things like particles really easy.

What went wrong

• Time pressure. FOR ONCE that I had a simple idea, I was still under time pressure because I didn’t find that much time to code. In the end I spent about 12 hours on the game (two mornings, one night).
• Phaser. The thing when you use a framework is that sometimes you have bugs straight from outer space with cryptic stacktraces, which are very frustrating and time consuming to fix.
  In my LD33 making of I wrote “I’ll try and take the time to learn more about [Phaser] before next LD! (but that’s what I tell myself every time, and know I won’t).” Guess what? I didn’t! And I hadn’t used Phaser since LD33 either, so I was (re) discovering it as I went.
• Getting stressed out and angry because of the two bullet points above made me a very unpleasant roommate. Not cool. It was pretty much the same for LD33, so I should work on that.

Final result

Play here.