Managing Mordor post-mortem: “Our first jam and we ‘f#$@ed’ it up!”

Yup we ‘fonted it up’ big time, but more on that later.

This was the first Ludum Dare my artist, Luc Wolthers, and I, Ben Myres, participated in and we absolutely loved it! The feed of people working on their games was so inspiring, plus the structure of the voting is a little addicting, I must admit :/. We will definitely engage more in the updating during development side, next time around.

Now to the game.

Managing Mordor is a stripped down strategy game where you play as Sauron (your cursor is his eye) and manage your orc production. Diseases strike your human farms –that you need to feed your orcs; you feed your humans steroids and research orc technology upgrades such as ‘Prozork’. All of this takes place in an environment where Lord of the Rings is constantly satirised. You can check out our page here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=17953

What went wrong:

Graphics:

• Slight Game maker art optimisation issues. Mostly to do with views squashing the art.
• Slightly different image sizes for variants of the same sprite. This often made changing sprites of objects a bit frustrating.
• Players need option to zoom out to feel less claustrophobic in some cases.
• Room layouts and ground textures are a bit boring and unattractive.
• Here’s a big one: illegible fonts. We used a Lord of the rings-esque font for much of the critical feedback and UI elements and it proved too difficult to read for players – as you can see from many of our page comments. We knew it would be a risk, but we still decided to use that font. Lesson learned. The title of this post refers to this to how we ‘fonted up’ the game ;).

Gameplay:

• Very basic and stripped down management game that perhaps requires more options.
• Quite repetitive.
• Too much focus and time spent in farm area.
• Not enough upgrade/building options with the spawn pits.
• Not enough feedback on research and other time-based game elements.
• Game should be entirely mouse driven. Requiring enter to close dialog boxes is jarring to the rest of the game requiring only a mouse.

Teamwork:

• Bad communication.
• Very little sketching/visualisation during pre-production – this feeds into communication.
• More feedback from non-coding members would be great. Requires earlier playable build for them to try out.

What went right:

Visually:

• Consistent and effective colour palette really captured the Mordor feel (albeit it is perhaps a little boring).
• Pretty and expressive UI elements.
• Art assets that conveyed the parody and humour of the game.
• UI + eye/beam was effective in conveying the feeling of Sauron always watching.
• Art in general was superb (this is based on comments, not out own arrogance :P).

Gameplay:

• We designed the game to be simple, yet have a frantic feel. This was definitely achieved.
• Humorous gameplay options (steroids for your humans, Prozork, etc.)

Music/Sound:

• Great music helped add to the mood.
• Sound affects added to the humour and acted as effective gameplay feedback.

Teamwork:

• Code, gameplay, art and music came together cohesively right at the end of development.
• Collective vision was achieved, even though the bad communication was a result over differing opinions on the process required.

Conclusion

Managing Mordor is a fun, little strategy game with great art, music and sound effects. It is a little repetitive, but the humour and satire makes up for this. The only large detracting factor is the illegible fonts. The changing of the fonts is likely the only thing we’ll alter with this game.