A Post Mortem – Somniphobia

Hmmm… I’ve never written one of these before.

Short version:

Bad

• Ld26 was held at a somewhat inconvenient time for us
• Was most certainly not the theme I was expecting to be chosen (nor did I want it)
• My internet had some issues, which caused problems since we were using Skype and Dropbox to sync our resources
• The game didn’t really end up with much of a story or game play

Good

• Enjoyable, like last time
• I, personally, think that my art team did some amazing artwork for the game
• Despite issues with people being unavailable, we still managed to finish something which we could submit as a ‘finished’ game
• Dropbox and Skype worked amazing for our coordination of the development
• Amazing start time (12:00 midday, relative time)
• A team to help me took so much stress off the development, and it was nice to talk to people while working on it

Longer version:

In general:

I guess I’ll start by saying that I most certainly enjoyed participating in LD26! This is my second entry, though last time I was solo. My team was made up of Zeapear, Binary Star and I, with me being the programmer, and the other two working on the graphics. Overall, I think the strongest point of the game is the amazing graphics which my team made for it, and apparently some people were fond of the music too. In terms of game play, I have to agree that it was somewhat lacking and this was partly because of unavoidable issues which led to members of the team being unavailable for periods of time over the course of the event. The time was a plus because 12:00 in the day is perfect; enough time to get up and ready, and enough time afterwards to make a start and not have a whole sleepless night knowing that a quarter of the compo is gone without you making any start whatsoever.

The tools:

The tools which we used for coordinating our work, notably Skype, Dropbox, and at a few points flockdraw.com, worked flawlessly over the duration of the event meaning that we didn’t waste time figuring out what was wrong with something, and instead had more time to work on the game. I used my Python+PyGame combo again and some of you may remember Tiny’s World, which I made for LD23 with them. The problem with Tiny’s World was that, being my first game, I had no idea what bundling was or how it worked, so anyone who wanted to play it got to install Python and then PyGame to play it. This time around, I’ve managed to get some simple instructions for most Linux users, and a compiled (.exe) version for windows.

Another point of view:

Since I’m only one person from the team, I have Zeapear’s view of how she found participating in Ludum Dare.

“This was a pretty fun experience for me. I did all of the level select screen’s art, and I did the opening ‘cutscene’ (the title screen and actual levels were Binary Star). While this game turned out a lot different than I, and I think the rest of the team, thought it would be, I’m fairly proud of myself for actually managing to get my bits done, as… Uh… ‘special’ as they may be. This was my first experience in game creation, and even though I did none of the heavy lifting in terms of programming, I think it’s pretty cool that I can say that I helped make something like this.“

Conclusion:

Well, that’s the end of my first Post Mortem, if any of you are interested in checking out our game, visit it at:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10594

If you do play, please read the description, it may make the game make a little more sense. I hope you enjoy playing what we managed to get done in the time we had!