Sam and Mas Two Button Attack Game – LD34 – Postmortem
This was our first Ludum Dare competition entry.
Game took 5 hours from concept to submission.
Removed time for Dinner and watching Red Vs Blue 
It is a pure gameplay focused game.
No animations to distract attention.
Used both themes: Two Button Control and Growing.
Lessons Learnt / Postmortem
The comments provided a lot of invaluable feedback.
The biggest theme to summarise this would be:
1) Do not stray too far from the standard of what is expected.
A common comment was that having no visual feedback through animation made it difficult to play.
Our internal thinking at the time:
- We were just focusing on gameplay.
- It was a 50 / 50 decision and as there were only two of us, TrollPiggy vetoed as he was the lead 😉 (Not pointing fingers, just saying it how it is)
- We made it purely so that the player would try to psych each other out.
- Think of how cycling sprints work in velodrome, they will follow each other slowly and then sprint when they think they can get the upper hand.
- This is why there is very little on the actual screen itself.
- There is like a meta game built in
It turns out that by doing this, it made it too hard to play.
A more standard design would have had animation and/or sound to provide additional sensory feedback.
3) Remembered how powerful Construct2 was as a tool
We first picked up Construct2 back in 2011. At the time, HTML5 was not that widespread, so game performance on different platforms was not very good. Trying to target mobile was quite difficult.
Since then, we have used both Unity and Unreal Engine 4.
Getting back into using Construct2 was just like riding a bike. After not having used it for a long time (years??) it was easy and felt natural to use.
Remembering how easy it was to use, allowed me to finish the One Game Per Month Challenge (#1GAM) after this Ludum Dare. I finished an additional 8 games before the end of 2015.
In Summary / TL;DR:
Keep expected parts standard and Construct2 is just like riding a bike. 😉
Sam and Mas Two Button Attack Game was TrollPiggy’s 2nd game, richardboegli’s 4th.
TrollPiggy:
1) RunGunSwordPunchKick: YouTube
richardboegli:
Game Title Link Engine 1 40in40book – Match Face Game Web Construct2 2 40in40book – Carrot Attack Web Construct2 3 40in40book – Carrot Attack 2 YouTube Unreal Engine 4 4 Sam and Mas Two Button Attack Game Web Construct2 5 40in40book – Sam Smile Infinite Auto Runner Web Construct2 6 40in40book – Sam Smile Pizza Drop Web Construct2 7 40in40book – Sam Smile Flying Dodge Web Construct2 8 40in40book – Sam Smile Tap To Fly Web Construct2 9 40in40book – Sam Smile Infinite Jumper Web Construct2 10 40in40book – Sam Smile & Mas Turret Defence Web Construct2 11 40in40book – Sam Smile Auto Carrot Launcher Web Construct2 12 The Beginning Is The End Racing (TBITER.com) YouTube Unreal Engine 4