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Hey there! This Ludum Dare I made a game called Coin Rush; you might have heard of it. It’s a fast-paced action-arcade arena game where the goal is to bounce on enemy heads and collect as many coins as possible.

If you’re awesome, you can play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=4882

Anyway, on to the postmortem.

What went right?

– The part of the game that I’m most proud of is the art. I’ve never made art like this before, most times it just flops and looks like crap.

– I finished most of the game in a timely manner, and I wasn’t feeling too rushed at the end.

– I succeeding in making exactly what I imagined it being, with only a few changes necessary.

– I had almost no time to make the music, but from the feedback I’m getting, I’d say the short loop isn’t that bad.

What went wrong?

– I didn’t take time to actually play my game during development. After the compo ended, I realized how broken and unbalanced it really was.

– The collisions. This has two parts. The first is that it is very hard to land on an enemy’s head. This is due to both the high-friction movement and the collision code. Second, the weapon collisions. I didn’t have time to think of how to do them, so I just made a circle around the weapons and detected it from there. The problem is that the circle is a lot bigger than the weapon itself, resulting in pretty much invincibility very early in the game.

– I had to learn JDBC. I wanted to add online high scores, but I didn’t know how to do that in Java. So it took a while to figure that out.

– I couldn’t deploy to web. This actually has two sides to it. First, I wasted about an hour or two trying to figure out web deployment, in vain. But I turned it around with a quirky html file that actually ENCOURAGES people to download it. Some people completely skip over an entry just because they have to download something. Since I couldn’t web deploy myself, I had to think of a way to keep people from moving on.

Overall, I feel like this is my best effort so far in a Ludum Dare compo. Lots of things went right for me, I stayed focused more than any compo before, and I took what knowledge I have of game design to try and make a game that’s a fun and enjoyable experience.