Post-Goat’em

Okay, so I finally got to write the post-mortem of our LD 27 Jam-Entry “Goat Tower”.

The creating of this game involved a lot of fun, bleating into a microphone and eating a lot of food.

Being a goat can be tough.

The Good:

+ Teamwork:

got to a buddy and jammed at his house, and on the third day we got support from another buddy, who unluckily had only time for (the last) few hours.

+ Homebrew Soundeffects:

creating (trying to create) the sound effects by ourselves was a lot of fun. The bleating was made entirely by myself. Fun-Fact: The grass-eating sound effect is me, eating a cookie.

+ Food:

We had a steady supply of healthy nutrients, which we used to make more nonsense nobody needs.

+ Fun:

we had a lot.

The Bad:

– The Theme:

Seriously, screw it. Nah, it wasn’t that bad, but it just wasn’t what I had in mind. The only thing that got stuck in my head was that #LDTD and #LDTO thing that had been going on before the jam.

At one point during the weekend, we nearly lost all motivation, but then we said, f* this, we’re just going to make a game about goats, and it is going to be the best game about goats ever.

– Missing Preparation:

I wanted to create a Web Game, so I tried to create a Game with LibGDX, which I haven’t used since two weeks before the LD. But unfortunately, the export to HTML5 didn’t work (because it always throws NullPointerExceptions for no obvious reason), so I still failed my goal to create a Web Game.

GIT is a nice tool, as long as you work alone. As soon as you have to merge and branch and stuff, it just doesn’t work anymore. (Or at least I always get confused on how to do it.)

-Inproper Division of Labor:

My buddy and me are both programmers, but since only I was familiar with LibGDX, we decided he should do the art and I do the programming. That wasn’t such a great idea, since he inefficiently did the assets while trying out and tinkering with different programs, reading tutorials about pixel art and just not doing what he is used to do. Because well, we are Programmers. Next time, we probably will work together on the programming, but first we will have to sort out our problems with GIT.

-Being out of Scope:

We weren’t able to implement everything we wanted by far. (Mainly because of previously mentioned reasons.) It’s really hard to keep things simple when you have so much ideas, I guess we’ll have to train to cut those things that nobody needs. But we already implemented some (are going to implement all) of the missing features in the post-compo version. (Powerups, Gamepad Support, More Varied Enemies, …)

Sometimes you have to set priorities. Implement that new enemy, or add that other feature that makes you giggle everytime you think about it? Well, obvious choice.

-Last minute “Level Design”

And I again kept the level design and difficulty tweaking to the last minute (literally). It was easily beatable by me (and the testers), so I thought it was okay, but I should have known better, because many people were complaining about the difficulty.

So, remember for next time: Making it slightly easier than you (the creator) think it should be, is usually difficult enough for the average player.

Now go and play our Goat Simulator 2013 (or was it Goat Tower, I’m not so sure anymore), and have some fun being a goat.

(If this game doesn’t make you laugh, nothing will, I’m sorry for you :<)

PS.: Everyone happy final Ludum Dare voting hours ^^