Ludumdare's 48 hours game competition: postmortem by Codexus

Goals

For this competition my goal was Total World Domination... ooops no that's for the next one. My goal was to make a simple 2D game using pygame, the SDL based game library for the python language.

What Went Right

1) The theme: A guardian game. Protect!

This was a very good theme. Very open to allow a wide variety of interpretation. I thought of the idea of making my game about a guardian angel right away.

2) The graphics

I quickly realized that to be able to make all the graphics in time I had to do something simple. I drew a fake screen shot with South Park style characters. That was an good choice as I wouldn't have been able to do something more complex. I used photoshop 7 vector tools which were well suited for the task but since I'm not an artist, it still took me a lot of time to do the graphics.

3) Pygame and Python

I spent some time learning pygame before the competition so I wouldn't have to waste precious time figuring out how it works. Pygame is a great library, easy to use and it has some nice sprite functions that allowed me to quickly get some results. I lost some time due to my lack of knowledge of python but probably less than I would have spent dealing with C/C++ pointer or memory issues. I had no speed problems (but maybe that's because I've only tested the game on a reasonably fast machine)

4) The Fun factor

I've had a lot of fun playing my game, so even if that's a biased opinion I think other people might find it fun too. I was also quite surprised when that the silly little sounds I recorded improved the fun of the game a lot more than I expected.

What Went Wrong

1) Too much time wasted

I was a bit lazy and I could have worked another 4-5 hours on my game. That would have allowed me to submit a more complete and polished entry as well as avoid the last minute rush. Also I wasted a lot of time in photoshop too as I don't know that software as well as I need to.

2) No map editor

One thing I would have needed is a simple tile-based map editor that could output its data in a python-friendy format. Editing the levels by hand at the last minute wasn't really the best way to do it. So a map editor is the tool that I'm gonna code before the next competition.

3) Unfinished stuff

• Character animation: I had no time to make an animation for the angel or the skater
• Not enough different enemies: There are only 3: the flower pots, the dogs and the skaters. Not enough to be interesting a long time
• No music
• Only 2 levels

Conclusion

This competition was a lot of fun and I look forward to the next one. I don't regret any of the choices I made for my game and I'm really glad I chose to use pygame. I just wish I could be a little less lazy next time :)

References

The Python Language - www.python.org
The Pygame library - www.pygame.org