I've finally found some time to write a post mortem, so here we go.

It was quite an intense weekend and I’m fairly happy with how everything turned out. I spent a lot of time redrawing the graphics. You proably can’t tell because they’re still kinda meh. But trust me, what I had before was much worse. You can still see the floor tiles which I originally had on the menu screen. But you can’t really recognize that there are supposed to be leaves on the floor and so I redrew it with the lighter version that is now in the level. It also took about 6 attempts to get a tree that was somewhat ok looking. I don’t really have that much practice with these things.

The sounds of the crows and the falling nuts were recorded on saturday in the local park. I am really happy with how the cawing adds to the ambience of the game and it was time well spent to find a crow that would let me record it. I also have some recordings of rustling leaves and subtle rain but didn’t have time do do anything with it. I would have liked to have the weather change as the game progresses.

Here is an image of the nut that produced the impact sound. The crow was too far away for a picture unfortunately.

The magic effect was a last minute addition. Originally I wanted just add a way to sprint with a stamina bar (which is why it is bound to the shift key) that you could replenish by eating nuts. However I thought it was too confusing to have a separate key for consuming the nut. I also didn’t like the look of a stamina bar in the UI. At the same time I wanted to give the players some way of defending against the crows. The squirrel already had the hat, so I decided to combine all of these features into the “aura” that lights up around the hat while magic is active. The brighter it is, the more ‘stamina’ the player currently has and the faster they move. I feel like this worked out quite nicely. Do let me know what you think!

Of course I also had many more ideas that didn’t make it in time.

• Obstacles in the game world, like branches.
• A way to dash and ram into the crows to throw them out of the playing field
• More advanced movement for the player, like some acceleration and a bit of sliding.
• Perhaps the ability to pick up multiple nuts at once.
• Instead of the crows just appearing, they were supposed to arrive flying.
• Generally, I think there should be more trees. But I wasn’t sure how that would work out because they obstruct a lot of area behind them form view. Perhaps some sort of parralax.
• Maybe a timed mode where you have to collect enough nuts before a timer runs out.

Let me know if you have any more ideas or feedback!