I don’t usually do postmortems for my Ludum Dare games. Usually because I don’t have anything interesting to say.
“I’m happy with this, I’m unhappy with that.” Done.
But not this time. This time a have a short story.
I went into this LD with high hopes. I had a cool idea, although I wasn’t quite sure what I’d do with it (heck, I’m still not). I had a cool aesthetic that I felt the need to show off:
I even felt good about audio, although the end result there wound up a rushed hour’s worth of work.
At the end on of the jam, I was happy. Aside from the audio, I’d accomplished what I set out to do, and the end result felt polished and fun.
Then I had my girlfriend play it the next day.
She couldn’t hit anything.
I’d made too few hit frames, and not accounted for the space between the frames of the very fast-moving attack.
And I’d done all the testing myself. I knew the attack frames. I could land a hit with ease. It never occurred to me that my play style was built around non-obvious, broken controls.
Disappointed in myself, I set about fixing the control scheme post-jam, a process that only took me about 30 minutes and made the game MUCH more fun. But it was too late for the jam.
I already knew this lesson, but this drove it home hard: play test your jam games. It can be the difference between a broken mess and a fun game.