Between the lines Post mortem

After having submitted my first game for Ludum dare, now my first post mortem.

Overall I must say, it was a heck of a lot of fun. Also things went surprisingly better than expected. I was expecting my game to be mediocre, seeing as how this is my first ever fully completed game. However it got a lot of responses and most of them were quite positive. I even got on the 50 most commented games list

What went right

• Theme. I personally thought the theme was horrible and way too open to be creative with when starting. (Still do.) I just started making a simple platformer, because I knew how to do it and just made it somewhat like the theme. (taking inspirating from simple google searches). After a while I still didn’t have a better idea so I just kept the platformer and expanded it.
• Gameplay. My game is basicly a simple platformer with one special mechanic; the ability to become intangible and fall through platforms, wall and ceilings. I personally thought this was a very simple and not that special idea. However there were several comments about how people thought the mechanic was really good.
• Time managment. I thought I would be working on this until a few hours or perhaps even minutes till the deadline, but I found myself reaching all of my set goals with still 14 hours left. This was very nice because it gave me the ability to fix a few mistakes which I found later.
• Graphics. I probably spend about have the time I spend on this game on improving the graphics and the end result is quite pleasing. I ended up using a new techinique using scanned paper and it gave a very real look. If you want a full post explaining the steps I took to get this look, leave a comment and I will give a full explanation.
• Potatoes. I added some potatoes as collectables as a joke. However I later found I always wanted to try and get all potatoes (even though I was playtesting and really should just test the level normally). Here is a hint to all ludem darers: add collectables. I also added a counted on the final screen to show how many you found, this added a reason to replay the game and try to find them all.
• Polishing. This is probably the most important lesson learned from ludem dare. Having a polished game is very fucking important. It doesn’t if you have a 1000 levels or the greatest sound effects. A short, well polished game is much more pleasing than a prototype which might get good if you put some time in it. Also because I had a reasonably polished game after the first day, I could set myself a list of standards I wanted my game to meet. That way I could focus on the most important parts and get the game ready very quickly. The take home message: Make your game presentable (loading screen, main menu, playable levels, ending screen) as soon as posible as it will help you smooth the rest of the game creation.
• A skip level button. After having everything polished, I had a fun little easter egg ending. However some of my levels were a bit hard, but I still wanted everybody to see the ending. So I added a skip level button. This was later appreciated by a few commenters, but was not something I would have added if I didn’t have an ending in place already.
• The tutorials. I wanted to tutorials that explains that had as few words as possible and did not restrict players at all. I personally hate it when a game comes with a wall of text and has you tediously forcing you to do all kinds of things exactly as said. Below is a picture of the first tutorial level. (It is also the first level after the title screen if you want to try it out.)

This level is supposed to teach you the following

1. You move the little block
2. Left arrow moves you left
3. Right arrow moves you right
4. You cannot normally move through the black, but you can through the red,blue and yellow
5. If you touch red,blue or yellow, that color is added to your sprite
6. If you have all three colors, you go to the next level

I ended up conveying all this information in no more than 0 words and 2 symbols.

The player start out right below the symbol for the right arrow key, the above screenshot is of the end of the level. Now let’s pretend the person playing this level does not guess how the game works. Of course the first thing most people do is randomly press some buttons, but hopefully they will see the little symbol which is supposed to represent the right arrow key. So eventually they will press the right key. They will see the player sprite move. (As it is the only thing that moves in this level) and will learn 1. and 3. However the player will eventually reach the red area. Since the player does not know how to jump yet, he will fall through the red, teaching him 4. However since he will automatically touch red, red will be added to the sprite. After falling through the red, there is a little opening. This is so the player had a clear view of the sprite and can see that the sprite now contains red, teaching him 5. Also now the player when trying to go right will eventually run into a wall, forcing him to try something else and press the left arrow keys , because that is the other symbol on screen. Now the player learns 2. Of course, the player may now expect to gain both blue and yellow as he passed through them. If the player missed that the sprite contains red, after collecting all three colors, the sprite looks noticibly differenct is surround by a large volume of white so it should be obvious all three colors are collected. After that I purposfully added a delay before going to the next level. If I didn’t players may not notice all 3 colors being collected or may mistake just touching blue as the end condition. After a short delay the level fades into the next level and the player learns 6. There are several “tutorial” levels spread throughout the game. I placed only the bare minimum at the beginning, because otherwise it might become tedious and only added tutorials for new mechanics right before there were normal levels utilizing that mechanic. I personally think good tutorials are important, because if you can make a tutorial without restricting the player to something like having to read textboxes or something like that, it makes the game much more fun. It’s a shame so many modern games do it wrong. If you a good example of a commercial game that it right, have a look at this analysis of megaman x

What went wrong

• Playtesting. I was the only one who played the game before releasing it. This was a big mistake as some of the first comments pointed out some obvious mistakes which a simple playtest by a third-party would have pointed out. Luckely I released well before the deadline, so I was this able to make some adjustements.
• Sound. I could not get the sound effects to play at the same time as the music, so I ended up dropping the sound effects in favor of the music.

Plans for the next ludum dare

I enjoyed this ludum dare a lot and kept it simple because my main goal was to actually finish a game so I kept it simple and use only simple tools. For the next ludum dare I will probably set myself a bit of challenge and try to do something more difficult. I will probably make my own game engine the next time beforehand (and release it publicly so other ludem darers can use it too) so I will be able to do some more daring things, that I would otherwise not have the time for if I did them from scratch.