Shoebox World: postmortem

This has been my second LD attempt and my second completed game!

Shoebox World

The Good

• Music. My first game to have it. Musagi is fun!
• Artwork. Perhaps you are thinking this should be in the Bad or even Ugly categories. This means you haven’t seen my previous games. I am actually improving!
• I started to hardcode the “goals” for winning the game and then stopped and decided, for once, that I would actually design it. It took a tiny bit more time than hardcoding but in the end all I had to do was cut and paste my first goal, change two parameters and presto, new goals!

The Bad

• The game is confusing for first-time players. I need to get better at making it accessible.
• I came down with strep throat on friday. I was a pitiful sight all weekend but damned if that was going to stop me.
• Even with the strep throat excuse, I could not dodge a commitment that stole away most of my sunday. I am just not good enough yet to make up for this lost time.

The Ugly

• I was reserving sunday night for game balancing and polish. I cut out any remaining features, made a test deploy to the server, a quick test pass and…it hangs?! Obscure error message deep in the framework?! Gahh! I lost all my polish time desperately trying to debug a dumb little error that happened only after a deploy to the server. In a way this was just bad luck since I am pretty familiar with the framework and the error ended up being obscure.

All things considered, another enjoyable experience. Looking forward to the next one!