Blanket Girl Post-Mortem

We entered the LD32 Jam as our second jam (the last being LD28), and after three days of sleepless nights and good fun we came up with probably one of my favorite projects to have ever worked on. It certainly wasn’t a perfect run, and there’s a lot we could learn from this time around, but we’re all pretty damn happy with the results.

Blanket Girl turned out to be a success for us. The game features a girl trapped in a dream with nothing but her comfy blanket to fend off enemies and solve puzzles (Though the puzzles in the entry aren’t very challenging). The blanket provides the ability to blast air at things, glide across gaps, and whip dangerous enemies away.

So far, the reviews have been pretty positive. This is no doubt thanks to the two talented artists and musician on the team, I think we really managed to get the atmosphere right. We’re still working on the game too, and while the progress has been slow since LD (university finals suck), things are slowly getting done!

You can see our submission page and play the game here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=31385

The good:

Jobs between the team members were split up pretty evenly. Considering some on the team had to take time off for personal reasons, just the right amount of stuff got done for us to have something playable.

The idea wasn’t over-ambitious. That was our downfall last time, but we learned from that and tackled something smaller this time around.

We learned a lot from our previous LD Jam attempt. I warmed up beforehand, and weused an engine instead of a graphical library which left us more time for actual game stuff.

The bad:

Lack of level design. I spent a lot of time reworking the level mechanics, which meant that until I was happy with how the levels were going to work, the actual levels couldn’t be made.

Lack of important game mechanics. The player doesn’t have any health mechanic, so the enemies just push her around. You can also jump on top of them and cheat the second level, but don’t do that. That’s cheating.

Aside from gliding, the other player mechanics aren’t utilized that much. Using the air blast skill isn’t used for anything until the last level, and the lack of a turbine model makes it somewhat unintuitive unless you’re told what to do.

Overall, just like the last LD we participated in, a lot can be learned from this. It was a pretty fun experience though, and I think something pretty great came out of it.