Arctic Upgrade Postmortem

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=2490

This was my fourth LD that I’ve been on (counting the MiniLD I had a few months ago) and while it was hard for me to come up with an idea for the theme I managed to do it. Also learnt some nice tricks while doing the game. However after creating the game I decided to do a balance of what went right and what didn’t:

What went right:

-Graphics. I’m glad I’ve chosen a small palette like the NES one, otherwise I probably couldn’t do graphics as well. It also helped that a few months ago I got useful feedback on TigSource about the NES palette. One day I’d like to do the same for a Game Boy or a Game Boy Color one. :p

-The mechanic. I liked how the upgrade mechanic turned out. I think there’s a lot of untapped potential on it that I need to expand, but it was nice to experiment with it.

-Going for a Jam. Originally the game was in the main LD compo, but I chose a Jam instead. The game was very incomplete before and thanks to the extra day I gave the game better controls, a new final, new level design, a timer and even some music.

What went not so great:

-Controls. The biggest hassle about the game from the feedback I’ve gotten are the controls. I’ve improved them in the Jam version, but they aren’t perfect at all. Next LD I’ll post mid feedback builds to fine tune the controls, as well the difficulty.

-Music. I composed the music on the Jam day and I can’t do chip-tunes very well. I had a music for the stage but it was poor so I removed it. Maybe next LD I’ll team up with a musician or brush up my chip-tune skills.

-Lost time because of the theme. Evolution isn’t an easy theme to get ideas from, in my opinion. Not the worse theme and there was some pretty fine entries from it. But getting a good idea for it took me some time.

Overall it was fun to participate on this and I hope to join next LD with a better game and have fun again. Now off to try some more entries. :)