To Continue Post Mortem

[Play and Rate])

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Hey! It’s been a whole nice year since last time I took part in Ludum Dare. And I finally came back! Last weekend I made To Continue in LD 31. It’s my 4th LD entry, and I consider it the best one I’ve made so far.

At first glance, the theme looked boring. I mean, Entire Game on One Screen? Aren’t the most games in the world played on one screen? But then I realized it has many potential interpretations, and some of them are very interesting. To keep mystery, I won’t talk too much about my game here. Please try it yourself :)

Below is my late post mortem.

What went right

Personally I think it went generally well, at least better than my previous LDs. It has sounds, scene transitions, various stages and a (quite simple) storyline.

The art style was a good decision. I have basically no drawing skill, but I’m familiar with Illustrator, and this style makes use of it. Just put some glowing and feather effects and boom! The dumb programmer’s art becomes ok-looking.

What went wrong

First of all, the performance. I know the correct way to draw dynamic glowing things is by using OpenGL shaders, but I don’t know how to code one and it’s impossible to learn a brand new programming field in 48 hours. So I invented my own silly algorithm, which is at pixel level and very slow. I planned to make a web version, but with this implementation I can’t do it.

As people mentioned in comments, I made my game too difficult(one of my friends thinks the difficulty is okay, but hey, he’s even beaten Super Hexagon…). It doesn’t have a real learning curve, most stages are equally hard. And I didn’t really test every stage thorough, so there was one stage(5th one) which can’t be finished without a little luck. These problems are fixed in post combo version, but I should’ve tested more ahead.

And sadly I can’t finish background music in time. I tried several music generators but all they don’t fit the style. If only I had known how to compose digital music…

Conclusion

This LD taught me a lot. My new year wish is to learn basic shader programming and digital music making. Then I’ll port To Continue to mobile platform(s).

Hopefully I can release it in mid-2015!

(and follow my twitter if you are interesting in the progress :D)