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.

What beats high mountains down?

Time.

As an alien trapped on an isolated planet, use Time to make your escape. Not just your ordinary everyday ‘time’, but ‘Time’; With a big “T”. Grow rock formations and watch them fall down. Move mountains. All in order to make your way home.

Beats High Mountains Down is a short puzzle platformer were you can move certain objects forward and backward through time to overcome obstacles and defeat planetary threats.

Play, rate and discuss.

So I posted my entry before the Compo deadline last night, but after editing it today I’m now getting the message, “WARNING: Your game is currently Inactive
Make sure you have all required data.” If I want to post a change to it, I have to set it as a Jam game. Is this fixable? Other than jumping into the Jam and competing with far more polished games, that is.

I’m in for Ludum Dare this weekend. This time I plan to focus on assets over code, particularly audio assets, which I never get around to making. My tools:

• Blender – 3D assets

• Inkscape/GIMP/Mypaint – 2D assets

• BFXR – sound effects

• Abuntant Music/Sunvox – music

• Blender Game Engine – game engine (as per usual)

In addition, I’m going to use two general-purpose custom libraries for BGE Live_GameObject and JamWidgets for BGUI. They’re both new and largely untested, and I plan to use the jam to get some testing in. After that I plan to polish them up and write some documentation for a proper release. For now, they can be considered MIT licensed.