So Mørke is my first attempt ever at making a game for Ludum Dare.

It has its obvious flaws but generally I’m pleased with the result.

I’d like to say thanks to all who commented/voted on the game. I have a few thoughts based on those comments plus I made a video play-through of the game:

• As usual I’ve been too ambitious with my project. I wanted to present a complicated story through small clues given by the NPCs in the game. I ran out of time and the story telling is nowhere near where I had first imagined it to be. As a result no one who plays the game has a chance to figure out what’s going on. As evident by the comments this also confuses some players at the end, where they are not sure if the game ended properly or not. To those people I can say: “Yeah, don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything. I’m just being a pretentious jack-ass.
• I didn’t spend enough time on the mechanics. Mørke is just a basic platformer, but I spent so much time trying to create art for the game (not my strong side) so I basically didn’t have time to play around and polish the platformer controls. Next time I should try and dedicate some more time to making the basic controls ‘feel’ right.
• Learn my tools better. I spent too much time figuring out how to do stuff in Unity I really should have already known before I started. I also had to google to find out how I could export images with transparency with the art program I was using. I wasted time on learning tools that I could have spent on making the game. I have tendency to treat game jams as an opportunity to learn new tools/technologies. That’s ok, but don’t try to use too many new things. For instance I had never tried out the new GUI system in Unity, but I decided to give it a go for this game. There’s a bit of UI stuff in the game but there is a reason why this game is lacking a menu screen.
• Some day I might learn to scope my games realistically.

For fun, and so that you don’t need to play my game, I have also recorded a video of me playing the game. It includes all the endings so that the people who thought they might have missed something can finally sleep again with peace of mind.

regards,
Peter