NECLiD LD30 Post Mortem

A-a-and this is my second successful LD48. The first one was #28 and I made a game about parallel universes with some time bending stuff. This one I continue my experiments with simple, yet unusual gameplay concepts. That’s how I decided to make NECLiD.

The core idea came to my head few months ago. I was trying to come up with gameplay ideas for (how ironic!) parallelsync. Last time I “touched” it I spent, like, a month and got literally nothing. But what can be better for creativity than limited amount of time? Nothing. :)

Oh, and here’s the link to the entry.

Neclid Tools

• Intellij IDEA 13
• LibGDX
• Photoshop CS5
• Aseprite

Good Times

• Truly Rapid Development. The core stuff was ready after 5-6 hours from the beginning (my beginning, not the LD’s one), the whole game was written in 26 hours. What bothered me for, like, 60% of this time is level design. Gosh, I hate level design… well… I thought that I hate it but…
• Level Design Is Fun! Yeah, I actually mean it. I had a great time making, well, three levels. As far as I can see from feedback a lot of people can’t solve level 2-1, because its geometry is weird. Can you solve it?
• I Like It. For real, I’m very pleased with the result, I’m pretty pleased with music and graphics. I always wanted to “play” with non-euclidean (-ish) mechanics and weird level geometries. I have only one dream left: a rhythm game. Get ready, LD31! 😀
• Games For Everyone. My last jam entry was NeuroIDE for Cyberpunk Jam in April. It was the first time I thought about accessibility in games and changed few details to make the game accessible for colorblind. This time I raised the bar: my LD30 entry features: 1). OpenDyslexia font, which made font more readable for those with dyslexia; 2). ability to remap keys, which not only helps people with non-Qwerty keyboards, but also made it playable for left-handed people and people with motor disabilities; 3). colorblind friendliness.

I want to illustrate the last one with example.

In early builds tiles could be separated only by colors, pink or blue:

But then I applied protanopia filter and, well…

Which ones are pink? Which ones are blue? What’s going on? The solution to this problem was pretty simple and elegant:

It was a small fix for me as developer, but could be a massive improvement for those who have problems with color distinguishing.

Bad Times

• Cut This, Cut That. Well. It’s a compo. It’s only 48 hours. It’s only one way to produce stable and polished entry – cut stuff from the initial concept. Few characters with different abilities were brutally cut from the game and it made “Change Character” button pretty useless (not to mention, that it confused a lot of people that tried to switch to human character with visible Neclid Planes).
• HTML5, WHY YOU DON’T WORK. I hate this phase. Because I have weird problems with HTML5 ports. Every. Jam. And each time problems are totally new. This time HTML5 port on itch.io and GameJolt thought that it should leave arrow keys for browser to process. And when people tried to navigate through menu they accidentally scroll the page. It was fixed, of course, but, you know, it’s not a good stuff.

Walking On The Neclid Planes

What’s next? To be honest, I don’t know. :) I was working on a “big” project before LD, but I really like how NECLiD looks and plays. I also like the feedback and comments on it, so… should I switch the active project? Should I postpone the previous one and try to finish this one?

Decisions, decisions…