Hello Ludum Dare community!
I thought I would do a little post mortem on my game Dust Sorcerer developed in 48 for the compo.
Its an arcade arena shooter where the player controls a dust sorcerer.
Here’s a short youtube video if you don’t want to try the game yourself:
The Good
What I personally really liked in my game was the art. I am no artist and it is therefore pretty hard to get some decent looking game, but the last 2-3 months I had been practicing a lot of drawing and some modelling and it really paid off! Not only did my art get better, I also discovered new aspects of game development. Previously I was focused so much on gameplay mechanics, that I didn’t even notice that gameplay is only a part of a game(others are story, look and feel, even emotions). I would advise every programmer to get a basic understanding of drawing and modelling.
Another aspect I really liked how it turned out was the spellplay. The first spell, a flamethrower, was actually discovered by accident. In the first iteration I implemented a fireball that shoots continously, but I forgot a cooldown on it(e.g. only shoot it every second) so I got this weird ray of fire. I left it at that and increased the size of a fireball over lifetime and it became this amazingly satisfying effect.
The Bad
What I really didn’t do well is balancing. Many people in the comments claimed that the game is too hard for them. This is a big contrast to my gamer friends who said it was just the right difficulty. Next time I should probably think about some sort of difficulty slider so everyone can adjust the difficulty to personal preference or doing more testing with a broader audience would also be an acceptable strategy.
The Ugly
The upgrade system was the last thing I implemented. And I think that is the reason why it turned out pretty boring. I knew I didn’t have the time to implement an awesome upgrade system with spell modifiers(e.g. flamethrower now shoots in 2 directions). I should have planned this a bit more and for many people I can imagine that it got too complicated. There are 8 different upgrades in the game and to unlock all you would need to play many hours and each upgrade doesn’t give a reward worth it. They are pretty boring. They either upgrade damage of some spell by 20% or decrease the cooldown.
Resume
Although I hated the theme, I am still satisfied with the result and think that I learned much about how to design combat.
If you now think you need to play my game, here it is: Dust Sorcerer
You can have a look at my preparation at cabul.github.io/ld31
I was thinking about a tile based strategy game, with cubes as minions
Don’t give up, I’m sure you can come up with something nice, in the end this the objective of LD, right?
Challenge yourself and improvise!
And don’t forget, have fun 😀