Post mortem – 10 Second Hero

This was my first Ludum Dare, AND my first game jam. It was a really fun experience, and I certainly learnt a lot from it. It was a very good experience, and seeing everyone’s reactions to our game was really satisfying. And now, after some time for reflection, may be a good time for a quick postmortem.

What Went Right

• The theme. We loved the theme. In less than one hour after the announcement, we pretty much had the general idea of what our game would be, and on the next morning we already had a few pieces of code and some art to start.
• The code. We used a small opensource lib we made a few weeks after the jam, that made it easier to use Tiled and a few animations/entity/behavior/controller functions. On the game, after we smoothed out our core code, it became very, very easy to add new levels and features to the game, and very flexible on what we could do at each level.
• The art. One of our biggest inspirations for this game was the Atari 2600 Superman game. The simpler graphics helped in the sense we could get a lot of art, fast. It also did go well with the theme and soundtrack we choose.
• The music. Our musician was a great last minute adition to the team. His music did a big difference in the final game.

What Went Wrong

• The code. The base code for our game was kinda complicated, using some async calls and even multiple threads (a hell to debug on Visual Studio), at first. The first few hours of the jam were kinda complicated because of that. After João simplified part of the code, removing unneeded complexity and threading, it became very easy to add new features. (But still kinda scary to work on the core code).
• .NET/Executable. I have a feeling that a lot more people would have played our game if it wasn’t a Windows-Only .exe file. Some people had problems with the .NET framework, and of course, OS/X and Linux users can’t play our game. (For now. We’re working on ports). Porting is not working as smoothly as we wanted, and Web played games are really that much more pratical. We love MonoGame, but without a web option, it may be time to learn something else.

Overall, it was a great experience, and we’ll surely be better prepared for the next jam. Next time, I may even try joining the compo! :)

And, if you still haven’t played our game, you can try it HERE.