Post Mortem – Uno Terra

So, it’s time for a post mortem again. Not that anyone cares, but helps me reflect on what we’ve done, and we could’ve/should’ve done.

To start off, too many things went wrong this time around. Starting with the theme. We did not expect that, and we did not have the slightest clue what to make with that. Coming up with an idea which may stand out took us over 4 hours – that’s a lot of time wasted. We finally decided to do something between one planet – saving the earth, one life – doing some game with feels about suicide and one slash – a samurai cutting enemies with one slash. Saving the earth seemed like a good idea at that moment, but the planet defense game idea regarding it soon got too complex – which is obvious enough from our final entry.

At the end of day 1, we got shit done – just had the moon revolving round the earth, and you could place 5 buildings on both of them. Most of the other mechanics (pollution, population, wars) were added later on the fly, making me edit previous codes a lot of times. This is how it looked like at the end of day 1, the background really didn’t fit at that point either. We needed to redo it.

At the end of day 2, we had all the buildings done, but no level/wave design (which means no balance in the game, which was pretty much the most important aspect of the game) and no UI. There was a lot to do the next day. Our composer also had his college finals, so were left scouting for music online as well. Fortunately, Kevin Macleod’s site always has answers during times like these! Oh, and we had aliens and asteroids and stuff as well (and yeah, new bg):

We started work from 6 am in the morning, till 5.30 am the next day (the jam ends at 6 am in our time zone) – so yeah, you might as well say we weren’t even sure we would finish. I did the wave generation script in around 3/4 hours, without playtesting. Thankfully, our artist friend playtested the game continuous from 9 pm onwards, paving the way for a boatload of bug fixes and balancing. Yeah, I didn’t actually PLAY the game when we submitted. I just got lucky that somehow I guessed the resource/wave balancing good in the first try. one problem remained though (even with the current build): explaining the game. I did add a “Familiarize” mode (same game without enemies) because I didn’t have time to do a proper tutorial (and who plays tutorials anyway), and hoped people would try out that mode first before playing, to get to know the playfield first.

What did go right was the level design, and the game idea. I was surprised myself at how many strategies the game could be played with. Pranjal (our artist) made sure we had playtested a good amount of those – nuclear power generation strategies, playing by spamming with solar power plants (less need for plantation) etc.

Overall though, I’m really proud that we managed to pull all this off in 72 hours, and how this turned out:

So that’s about it for the post mortem. I started playing all the other awesome games today (it’s really amazing what people can do in 48 hours), looking forward to play yours!