Beneath Wireframe – Postmortem

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=2490

“Get as far as you can from the surface. Protect yourself by entering shapes. Control the dot with the mouse/trackpad.”

In this Ludum Dare I’ve created a game called “Beneath Wireframe”, a fast-paced arcade game where you need to enter shapes to keep alive. Here’s what went well and what didn’t:

What went right:

-The graphic style: I used the same graphic style in my previous entry, intervalo, and I decided to follow the same style when I created the graphics for this game. They were simple graphics that doesn’t take much time to create and, at the same time, were visually pleasing (or at least not unpleasing :p).

-The concept: This went very well. It’s an original concept that’s easy to pick up and play, but hard to achieve huge scores. It’s a good concept to expand in the future.

What didn’t went right:

-The “dot”: I should have used a larger actor to follow the cursor or at least put a bright outline on it.

-The dot’s movement: The main reason why I chose to make the dot follow the mouse over making the dot’s coordinates the same as the mouse coordinates was to not have mouse speed as a factor (at least not in very high mouse speeds). I shouldn’t have implemented the movement like this and I’ll correct this in a post-compo version, in case I create it.

-Lines’ visibility: The problem is that, when more shapes appear, it isn’t easy to distinguish a “completed” shape and a “non-completed” one, making the game harder than what should be. In the future I’ll solve this by fading the completed shapes in, among other visual changes.

-Misc.: The performance wasn’t very good in some computers because of some inefficient code logic I didn’t polish due to time constrains. I should have made a Windows/OSX/Linux native version instead to compensate for that performance loss. The game also lacked music, unfortunately.

Conclusion:

While I don’t consider this to be my best entry, I’m still glad to have participated on this. As if I’m going to expand this to mobile devices, it looks likely. I will participate again in August if I get the chance. :)