So, during the weekend I created the game I.A.N (Interdimensional Administration Network). In the game you’ve become the administrator of I.A.N, which is a network used by different dimensions to send data between them. Your job is to make sure that the data is transferred between the dimensions, which are represented by nodes on your node map. You swing between the nodes by tethering to them, and have to deliver data packages between them.
I really enjoyed creating this game, for several reasons. Number one is probably that I developed this game in dart, a browser-based language which compiles to Javascript. I’ve never worked with dart before, and it felt great, since it was something new and refreshing. I used the render engine pixi.dart, which worked out great in the end. I had the idea of creating a game that was really difficult even before this Ludum Dare. So when the game got the level of difficulty that I was looking for I was really pleased. The game is frustratingly difficult, but you still want to keep playing it, I can’t stop playing it myself, and my friends has told me the same.
What was difficult during the development?
Of course there were obstacles I had to climb in previous Ludum Dares, but not as much as this one. In the previous ones I’ve used Java and LWJGL which I’m familiar with. For this game I used Dart language and pixi.dart. Which are both new to me. This was also the first time I created a browser-based game. I had some problems with pixi early on, since I didn’t know much about it, and I did things inefficiently. The main problem with pixi was the it wasn’t as fast as I’d hope, and about six hours into development I considered switching to a different rendering engine. Luckily, I was able to resolve my performance issues.
Another challenge I had during development was the physics for the swinging mechanic. It involved math I’ve never done before, so I tried a lot of different solutions, but none of them worked the way I wanted to. When I finally was able to figure out how to do it, the final solution was a lot simpler than my previous attempts.
After the first day, I released a playable demo on my website (http://goudagames.com/), unfortunately the playable demo was unplayable. I had performance issues, and these issues would when you got the third node. This time, the perfomance issues wasn’t graphical. Something in MY code was slowing the game down severly, so I spent the whole morning of the next day to optimize the game. And I think the performance was raised by (at least) 300 %. Now I had a game that ran smooth and got all the gameplay it needed. I’d decided to keep the graphics simple, so I didn’t want to change them either. I considered myself done, except for audio.
Audio was one of the issues I couldn’t solve, mostly because it wasn’t anything I could do. Basically, the current version of darts implementation of web audio is working horribly. The sound is crackling and just sounds horrible. I know that it wasn’t just my game, since I looked at other implementations of darts web audio, and they all had the same crackling, so I decided to remove audio completely from the game. I decided that I would submit another silent game.
Now, I thought, I was finished. But then I got the idea of implementing a highscore feature, so that the globally highest score would always be shown on the game page. Unfortunately, I was unable to do this because of my inexperience with web development. I knew about HTTP requests, but my POST request didn’t work properly, and I wasn’t able to solve it, so I decided to scrap the highscore idea too.
How do you think the game turned out?
I had the idea of the game the whole time, and I knew that I wanted the graphics to be simple, and the gameplay smooth but difficult. I’m really, really happy with how the game turned out, even if I don’t get a high rating. The game started out as an idea, and the final product was exactly how I’d imagined it the first hour of development. I stuck with the same idea throughout development, and kept it simple, which is what I think made the difference between this entry and previous Ludum Dare entries. In both of my previous Ludum Dares I started out with an idea, but the game that came out of it wasn’t as I’d originally planned, and therefore I wasn’t as happy with them as I was with this game. It felt great to see your idea materialize in front of you, with no changes or tweaks. I personally love to play it, and I’m more than happy with this entry.
I would write more…
I would continue writing this post mortem even more, but time is ticking and I’ve got to go. Go play I.A.N and leave a comment saying what you think of it. Don’t forget to rate!
Until next time, goodbye!
