With the Christmas break starting, we finally got the time to write proper post-mortem and finish the post-LD version with improved graphics for our LD34 game “The Tournament”. You can check it out here. We also uploaded the source code if you are interested to take a look.

The game was designed to be an arena manager simulator, where you manage team of robots to get as many victories as possible. You don’t have the direct impact on the fights (as you are just the coach – not the gladiator), but you can choose the fate of the defeated opponents, suggest tactics to your fighters and choose who shall face each opponent.

What went good:

• Team communication: With the team of 6: 3 programmers, 1 graphic artist, 1 music artist and 1 UML guy, this could easily become a nightmare. Fortunately using trello turned out to be a pretty awesome solution for our needs.
• Splitting into prefabs: Our game is written in unity, and it’s known for being a little bit problematic when working with teams of programmers. But since from the very begging we decided to split every bit of functionality into separate prefab we did not had a single merge issue during the whole jam.
• Paying attention to the audio: I have to admit, that for me personally audio was always the thing I paid the least attention during the game jams. But oh boy was I wrong. Without the awesome soundtrack, the game would not feel even slightly as complete as it turned out to be.
• Creating mock-ups: It seemed like a waste of time, but they highlighted UI issues we would otherwise discover very late and with the final assets ready. It also greatly simplified the work of the graphic artist and allowed him to focus on delivering the best assets he possibly could without having to worry about the details.

What went wrong:

• Starting late: We had the idea for the game since saturday morning, but assembled the team and started working on it sunday at 12:00. This turned out to not be a great idea and resulted in less amount of sleep than we would like to.
• Too many features: Our initial plan was to deliver almost twice what we were able to finish in the time we had. Cutting features late was really hard and if we had started with the more humble plan at the begging we would still had a lot of time for balance and polish at the end.

Overall though, the Jam experience was a blast for the whole team. We learned a lot and had a great deal of fun Can’t wait for the next LD 😀

PS. Our music artist uploaded the Full OST to the soundcloud. It’s pretty sweet: