This postmortem covers my experience with the 11th Ludum Dare 48 hour game competiton, which took place somewhere around April 2008.

Final post

Timelog

Summary

Been a while since this took place, and I totally forgot to write down what happened back when I could actually remember it. So this post-mortem will be rather short. These things work better right after completing the game, but I just don't want to break the order of my posts! ;)

The theme resulted in Minimalist, which I would consider to be a rather abstract theme; that is, something less tangible than say BOATS. I totally dug that theme since I felt it was incredibly open for anything, and also invites for creating something very simple. However, simple also means you should probably aim for something stylistically beautiful rather than something fancy. Which can be hard to achieve.

            

What went right

Freshness

Gameplay was new and interesting, with the huge upside that it worked on any arbitrary 3d model. Meaning that it was easy to just add more content fast.

Simple presentation

The gamescreen was stylistically minimal and just displayed a score, and the actual model. It worked great, because the game was, in fact, totally simple and minimal - which happened to fit the theme! Whoa!

What went wrong

Muzak

I have never had a knack for creating music, and I have pretty much no clue which tools one should use. But this time there was a LD member who had created an easy-to-use retro music creation tool, so I thought i'd try and make something.

Unfortunately it turned out that I should probably just stay away from trying to create music. Forever. The tracks I made were really horrible and ear piercing :)

Camera

I attempted implementing an arcball camera, but it just didn't work out for me. I never got it fixed, so the camera control on the final build were totally inverted and just not intuitive at all. The game would have been better off without it.

Conclusion

Bring the next!