Post Mortem of My First Ever Ludum Dare Game: Journey Home

Please play and rate my game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=21579

Ok so this was my first time ever participating in a Ludum Dare, and I’m happy to say that it was more or less a success!

My game was called Journey Home, since that’s basically the premiss of the entire game.

You are a random dude on Earth who is just walking down the street when suddenly some sort of temporal shift happens in the universe and a portal to another world appears in front of you. It sucks you in and spits you out on some far away and unknown world. You walk around until you find another portal that takes you to another world. You hop worlds with the hope that one of the portals will take you home. Along you journey, you encounter strange and wonderful sites, creatures, plants, and ruin of ancient civilizations.

It sounds like a pretty grand idea, but I didn’t have time to add a bunch of the stuff I wanted. Nonetheless, I learned a lot.

What went well:

– I came up with a vision for what I wanted to make in the first half-hour.

– I made the initial engine in a couple of hours without too many problems, which was really good.

– My random sprite generating/coloring algorithms (yes plural) worked really well. I’m REALLY proud of one in particular. I create a sprite with specific parts being colored with a specific set of colors (grey, black, light grey, and white were what I used). I then create a square of colors which is the color palette from which the algorithm colors the sprite. This makes for an insane number of possible sprites.

– I created level changing as well as cutscene mechanics for the first time ever and I think they worked really well.

– I’m really proud of the animated stars in the background of the last level.

– I made a pretty awesome main menu (at least in my opinion).

– The game was definitely SUPER strange. :)

– Most importantly I had a metric butt-ton of fun and learned a lot.

What went… less than well:

– The tile image generator worked fine, but every tile of the same type was given the same image.

– I didn’t get to implement a lot of what I wanted to. I initially wanted to have 5 unique worlds aside from Earth. Each of these 5 worlds was planned to have some puzzle mechanics and 2-3 unique plants and animals. In the end I made 3 worlds with a total of one type of plant and one type of animal. I also had a push-pad mechanic on the second world which was cool, but hardly a puzzle.

– I didn’t get to put in too much sound. Aside from the first cutscene, there was no sound in the game. I did come up with a pretty cool theme on my guitar, but I didn’t have enough time to make a proper piece out of it and thus didn’t put it in the game.

– I didn’t get around to making a pause menu – although the entire game should take less then 10 minutes to play through (2 minutes if you don’t look around).

– I had a couple bad bugs that I spent a really long time fixing. The final game has no bugs (at least none that I’m aware of) but that really put a strain on time.

Overall:

Generally speaking, I’m pretty happy with the fact that I even had something more or less playable to submit – considering this was not just my first Ludum Dare but also my first ever serious game jam. I also really like the ideas I had for the game, so I may spend some more time and add them in for a post-compo build anyway.

I didn’t focus too much on the gameplay because that was not what I wanted to learn from. Instead I wanted to experiment with making cutscenes, the main menu, and procedural rendering algorithms. They all turned out quite well and I will definitely use the experience I’ve gained from this game in my true and more serious project: A Peasant’s Tale.

I have a small team and we’ve been working on A Peasant’s Tale for a few months now. Before I had a team, I had been working on A Peasant’s Tale for almost a year. I also make weekly videos of my progress on my Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjywaHBImnId4GNZXAuejKg

You can also stay up to date with Journey Home, A Peasant’s Tale, and any other games I make on my game’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/APeasantsTale

… ok that’s enough shameless self-promotion for one day…

If you read all the way down to here then I love you and you are awesome :)