This postmortem covers my experience with the 12th Ludum Dare 48 hour game competiton, which took place on the weekend of August 8-10 2008.

Final post

Timelog

 

Summary

The Tower came out as the result of the 2nd round of theme-voting. A somewhat less abstract theme than the last couple of times. Not necesarilly bad, but I do usually prefer the abstract themes.

My initial idea was to let the player use a grappling hook-thing to climb a tower. However, the physics of this gameplay urned out to be too much of a headache to get working as intended. Which was demotivating, seeing as I didn't come up with any alternative/better ideas.

So after struggling with implementation problems of the physics, I decided to simply ditch the whole thing; idea and all. Luckily this was still early in the competition, so this decision was not going to have as big of an impact as continuing struggling would have had. However, being left with nothing re-usable, I had to get inspired and get an idea quickly. A short walk did it for me. Because it was windy, I got the idea of pushing crates off the rooftop of a tower/skyscraper by controlling/drawing the wind.

I decided to run with that. Good thing I did too, considering that the wind gameplay was surprisingly easy to implement. As a result of this decision I had the main game mechanic completed mid-day 1.

 

 

What went right

Ditching idea that went bad

I'm pretty certain that I saved my spot in the list of entrants because of my choice to ditch the first idea i went with. I think I would have wasted an entire day+ simply on tweaking physics variables.

Controls

The mouse controls came out very intuitive, and made the toy easy and fun to use.

Toy

Supported by intuitive controls, and combined with proper rigid physics, the wind mechanic just worked.

Sounds

All sounds in the game were created by me simply blowing into my microphone, and they just sounded right in first go. Who knew wind sounds could be made so easily.

 

What went wrong

Requirements

I almost don't want to include this again, seeing as it's always in this list. But as usual, this competition is not suited for heavy use of Microsoftian technologies.

Presentation of concept

After completing, it has become apparent to me that the concept of the game did not come out very clearly. Which means I could/should have presented it better.

My intention was to let the player use the wind-toy to explore the content and while doing so discovering achievements. But since there were no "prizes" for discovering/completing these, it did not come through very clearly that this was the whole idea of the game. Also, I implemented these achievements way too late in the process (end-day 2) and as a result i ended up with a minimal amount of them. There simply had to be more to support the concept.

Sleeping

When day 1 was coming to an end I decided that I didn't want to stay up too late. I thought i'd rather go to sleep early, and be fresh and lucid the following day, than staying up pushing code.

My plan didn't go too well, though. I was literally twisting and turning for a good couple of hours before finally passing out. My mind was simply not able to turn off because I didn't relax, by watching tv or whatever, prior to hitting the sack. Made me a bit cranky the following day.

 

 

 

Conclusion

I'm quite satisfied with my work this time around. Sure there's a bunch of stuff I could have done better. But let's face it, there always is. I had fun. I got stuff done. What more can you want?