First time making postmortem. Our LD59 game Lighthouse Diaries was special game in many aspects, so I thought it would warrant a post mortem.

There would be lot to say if I told everything we did. However, there was many same things that we've done in previous ludums and the most learning occurs when doing something new and going out of comfort zone, so I tell what we did differently this time.

Light effect

We planned a normal light effect first, but then the graphics team got a wild idea that it could be an old map that turns into a more natural looking surface when the beacon light touches it. We achieved this by making all map graphics two times and using mask layer.

zoom levels

This time we wanted to try using variable zoom levels and actually achieved it. You could zoom in and out with mousewheel and it was awesome!

The zooming or more like the scaling thing posed some problems too... which were our own making. There was some miscalculation of the asset sizes in the planning and our graphics team made super high resolution graphics compared to the actual zoom level they would be viewed.

There would be pixel by pixel accurately drawn ships in something in the lines of 256x256 and they looked amazing, but also took whole lot of artists time

All active objects were drawn in super big size and levels became about 10k x10k pixels, so drawing the maps was an opposite of a breeze

...Yeah, we're probably never doing that again!

Water Shader

For the first time in Ludum, we used a shader and with some effort from one of our coders we got very beautiful "animated" sea.

Dynamic music

You heard it right. DYNAMIC. MUSIC.

Our Music team has always overdone itself and made such wonderful consistent and catchy songs for our games (and even a rap for the credits screen for every game!) ...But this time they planned something totally new!

In the first plan, not only would the music change depending on the events, but it would also constitute of several tracks that would be played simultaneously. How awesome would that be!

So two different themed layers of music was made, one bunch for lighter mood and another for a more scary/anxious mood:

...In the end we didn't have time to implement the situational music properly, but we still used all the tracks!

Now in the current gamejam implementation there are two lighter maps and an anxious map... And you will have a randomized easy going music that is slightly different for each time you play it and similarly randomized anxious music in the last level.

Each 20 seconds of music consists of 2-4 randomly chosen clips layered on top of each other... So with quick calculation there's 7x7x7x7 + 7x7x7 + 7x7 = 2793 different ways any 20 seconds of the song might play.

Same calculation for anxious music where 1-2 of 4 clips might play simultaneously: 4x4 + 4 = 20 different anxious music compositions.

That was about all the new stuff

...So enjoy the game with super accurate zoom in and your unique soundtrack every play!

And if you haven't yet tried it, try Lighthouse Diaries