My brother sort-of did a post mortem, but I don’t think it fully covered this Ludum Dare and our game Double DeConstruction.
Going into this Ludum Dare, this was my team’s fourth time attempting the Ludum Dare, after failing to create a full game 3 other times. Our spirits were high, although understandably weakened. We came up with, 9-days before the Ludum Dare, a pre-Ludum Dare mini game idea where you’d play some sort of construction vehicle, like a bulldozer, and would run over things as the screen moved, much like the game Robot Unicorn Attack. I decided to not do it to try and save energy for the Ludum Dare. A day or two before the Ludum Dare came, I thought that people might choose End of the World. So we started pondering at the mini game idea, saying that the reason for this vehicle running over things would be because the world is ending and the person operating it doesn’t care what they do anymore.
Come the day of the Ludum Dare, “You are the Villian” is announced. Funny enough, this still fit into the game scenario in a sense. The thing is, I didn’t want to make a Robot Unicorn Attack type game, so I opted in for a top-down shooter. We discussed how to set it up, and while one member was reluctant to do this idea, because they didn’t like the genre, we still did it.
The Ludum Dare jam for us starts at 6PM on Friday and ends at 6PM Monday.
On Friday, we managed to get test objects up and running along with setting up the game states.
On Saturday, we had the player and enemy shooting wrenches out. The battlegroud image was completed and the official sprites were prepared.
On Sunday, we put in the title, character selection, and good/bad ending game states. The AI was also made during this day.
On Monday, in the very early morning I put in the sounds and music, as well as the amount of points you get for the kill to pop up (aka polish).
What went right?
- Organized steady development in a timely manner
- We had the game up and running just hours after the announcement
- Accomplished the retro look we were aiming for
- Multiple, separate, battle songs for each player and just overall awesomeness handling the music
- Both characters were fairly balanced during gameplay
- Got to polish things, like adding points flying in the air when you kill something
What went wrong?
- Body and arms were supposed to be separate, but due to miscommunication ended up as one piece.
- The good ending text did not look how I thought it did when I was tired. Being very awake made that very apparent.
- Didn’t get to improve the character selection screen, which was meant to have stuff moving behind the characters and marque the selected character name.
- Shipped it out with a game breaking bug that I just fixed a few hours ago. It was that hard to find.
- Noises were too loud and obnoxious if too many were being sent out. This definitely wasn’t intentional.
In conclusion, we are very happy. I wouldn’t say just happy, it felt more like a sigh of relief that we finally were able to complete the Ludum Dare. I want to do it again, but I honestly don’t know if my team wants to do it again. I think they want to stop doing the Ludum Dare on a good note. Who knows, maybe I might compete in the compo by myself and not the jam with my team next time around. Back on topic, all-in-all, it was a great experience and really taught me some things, namely how good it feels to complete a project. So, until next time…
